Friday is now.

A few days of no-schedule time between now and the next sampling.

I already mowed the yard this morning - it needed it, and I find I am less prone to have serious problems from the heat first thing in the morning than last thing at night. (I use an old-fashioned reel-type mower, so I don't wake the neighbors if they're not up yet. And yes, I was out mowing before 7 am, so probably some of them weren't).

Now, I'm going to sort a few soil samples. Then go home and, I think, spend some "quality time" with the quilt. (I worked some on the Miss Marple shawl last night. I do think I'm going to run short of yarn but I'm waiting a bit - I might still be able to order more from Simply Sock Yarn, probably won't be the same dyelot, but it's probably better to have a slightly wonky dyelot (it's Noro, so it won't really show with the striping) than to do the other thing I thought to do and just truncate the shawl and have it be a three-pointed shawl I always fold in a certain way (to hid the missing fourth point).

I also thought some more about the shawl I want to make from the stripey "Pegasus" yarn. I found the lace pattern I was thinking of (it's actually called something like "Fern Stitch" but it looks like little falling feathers to me). I need to get out the graph paper and start charting - I can see how I'd increase for the shawl (basing it on other triangular shawls, like the Icarus shawl, where there are four increase points each increase row: one at each edge and one on either side of the center stitch) but I want to see if that will work for working in new repeats of the pattern. (I may play around a bit on a small scale with some leftover sock yarn, just to see what happens).

I also found a feather-inspired edging that I might try to work onto the shawl (Though I don't know: it's a pretty detailed lace that might fight with the color changes; the main feather pattern is pretty simple and will probably look fine).

If this actually WORKS, I will try to find some kind of free (or cheap)charting software I could use that would work with converting the file to a .pdf, and I will upload it as a free pattern on Ravelry. (This is probably a year or more out if it happens. And of course, if you're not a ravelry user, I could e-mail you a copy).

I will first have to do the pattern version of a literature search or examination of the "prior art," just to be sure no one else has come up with this; I don't want to seem to be inadvertently plagiarizing someone else's work, but so far I have not found any shawls exactly like what I am thinking of.

I'm kind of excited about this. I've designed socks before but socks are really pretty basic: you take the sock "blank" pattern and plug in your stitch or colorwork, adjusting the number of stitches as needed. But a shawl where you're going to have to work in new repeats of the pattern as the shawl grows, that's something different for me.