Phew

I did it! I grafted the two bits of my cowl - without any tears or anything! Not perfectly of course - despite the instructions I still managed to have it go crooked, but nobody will ever notice that when I'm wearing it. So I finished it on Tuesday morning, blocked it Tuesday afternoon,

(quite proud of my ingenuity there actually - I'd been wondering how I'd block it and worked out that a rolled up camping mat was perfect), and wore it to knitting night that evening. It was my 'coven' who gave me the yarn for my birthday, so they were pleased that I'd a) used it and b) broken into the scarey world of lace knitting in the process!

So that was my first time following a lace chart (turned out to be a doddle - thanks, Gudrun, for a nice clear chart) and my first time doing much fiddly grafting (had only previously done the few stitches on the toes of socks) - all in all a success. And with the very changeable weather this week, the cowl has been very useful already. Malabrigo's a reaaly warm yarn, isn't it?

I tried to photograph myself wearing it for my Projects page on Ravelry but the only picture that didn't look silly was the robbing-a-bank pose, which looks silly in a different way.

I've done a bit more dyeing too - a marigold (calendula) one this time, with just enough flowers to make a pale yellow. As ever the yellow hasn't photographed well, but trust me, it is yellow and it is pretty.

It looked absolutely nothing in the dye-pot and I had to restrain myself from chucking other things in to add some colour, but it was worth the restraint. I don't know whether I'll bother with calendula again - I love the flowers but the colour I got from them is not dissimilar to the one I got from horsetails last year, so I think on the the whole I'd rather use the weeds for dyeing purposes and grow the marigolds just for my own pleasure.

I'll end with a picture I took on the way to get the kids from school yesterday, purely because I love the colours:

I love it when nature bungs colours together that I would never have thought of putting together and it looks great. I probably looked really weird photographing the pavement but I'm trying to train myself out of embarrassment at things like that!