Putney shawl grows

Here it is today, after ~2 hours of invigilating-knitting:



It's a bit over 1/3 of the way of the increase rows (I have 111 rows there, and it's 256, by my calculation, until you start the knit-plain rows)

Here's where it was last night:



I'm using the recommended yarn (Green Mountain Spinnery "Simply Fine") but in a different color than the model in the magazine was made from.

I really like this yarn. (I know, I say that about a lot of yarns. But there are a lot of really NICE yarns out there now - pleasant to knit with, lovely colors, yarns that give good stitch definition...). This yarn in particular is more "grassroots" without being truly "rustic" - it has a bit of the lanolin left in it, and there's an odd tiny bit of vegetation, but it's definitely not a "spun in the grease" minimally-processed wool. Kind of the best of both worlds - it's not so machine-made feeling that you can't sense the animals it came from, but it's also a bit more refined than many of the "in the rough" wools I've seen.

I think part of the reason I like it is it is kind of "timeless" feeling - it is a yarn like ones my great grandmother would recognize, and I LIKE that. Just as I like being able to cook old recipes or make other things that seem to me like something not too heavily touched by the more-technological post-modern world.

It's about half wool and half mohair, and it has that nice slight 'grabbiness' that you get with mohair (perhaps especially when it's spun as a single, like this yarn is). The yarn kind of velcroes to itself....and I kind of like that. Again, you get the feeling that it's less-processed than many yarns.

I could see knitting mittens out of this yarn as well....they would make nice warm mittens. Or a hat, maybe done with two colors and some kind of a stranded pattern.

I'm also considering, depending on how long it takes me to finish this shawl, if this might be a candidate for a Christmas present for my mom - made in a different color, maybe a deep red or an emerald green, some kind of color she wears regularly. I think she'd like this shawl; often in the winter she wears things like this, especially to church or places like that.

It makes me happy that I can order direct from Green Mountain. I may look at my copy of their knitting book (it's a few years old but I bet they still make some of the yarns featured) and consider ordering a yarn sometime for one of the sweaters in there.