“Truth is the strong compost in which beauty may sometimes germinate.”  – Christopher Morley

Truth #1 – I love Through the Loops Designs. To wit:

That’s 21 TTL designs right there, and I left out a couple of hibernating knits. Kirsten’s designs are beautiful, her patterns are easy to follow and enjoyable to knit, and the finished product is imminently wearable.

Truth #2 – I love The Plucky Knitter yarn.

Sarah’s colors are gorgeous, rich, and luscious, and I love her yarn bases. (Also, her customer service is exceptional!)

Truth #3 – I love knitting shawls, apparently. I also really love purple and gold together, it turns out.

Truth #4 – I love a good mystery.

Truth #5 – I have amazing and generous friends, who give me yarn, just because. 

If truth is the strong compost in which beauty may sometimes germinate, then I have good soil indeed.

This is my finished Through the Loops Mystery Shawl 2013. The pattern has since been named Germinate, and as you can see, it has a gorgeous leaf theme to the lace.

Casting on at the beginning of June, and finishing up four weeks later, I adored knitting this. As usual, Kirsten’s pattern was clear and easy to follow (with both written and charted directions for the lace). As usual, Sarah’s yarn was perfection. The mystery component of this knit – four clues over four weeks – made it so manageable and so much fun. It’s always exciting to receive the next clue, and to see how other people’s shawls are progressing as well.

Watching the stripes and the lace play out together was magical, and it was also super-fun to see the color combinations other people chose. Everyone’s shawl looked so different, all based on color choices.

I do seem to have a thing these days for purple and gold together. It definitely puts me in an autumn frame of mind.

I went through hilarious shenanigans trying to get this blocked and photographed in early July. It was so humid in Georgia, where I had taken it for its photo shoot (what? do you not travel several hundred miles to photograph your handknits in beautiful settings? yeah, me neither. I was down there for a class and brought the shawl along). First, the shawl wouldn’t dry because of the humidity (even after two days on my parents’ screened-in porch, it was still quite wet). Then I pulled it outside, spent several minutes in the blazing sun pinning it back out again. It only took about twenty minutes to completely dry with the sun directly on it – and then a thunderstorm sprang up suddenly and soaked it. Fun times! I think it rained at least a little – and sometimes quite a lot – every day I was in Georgia; it was actually still drizzling while I modeled the shawl for these pictures (hello, frizz!).

But I digress. The point is this. I loved this pattern, I love this yarn, and I am so happy with how this fall shawl turned out.

raveled