The Tart, The Duck and the Shawl

Hello everyone!

Thanks for all the lovely comments and messages I've received since I've 'opened' my blog! It gives me a lot of motivation to keep going! I hope I can keep you all excited and interested over the next many many years to come ;-)

So, what have I been up to? Well, I finished my "Leftie" shawl/scarf a a couple of days ago, but have been too busy with work to take some good pictures! But today I started work late, and Matt had a day off from work, so we planned a little 'picture' day all in honor of my new scarf. Sounds silly huh? But we were excited and made a little morning out of it including a nice coffee and cake to start off our little photo trip. We found this tiny little café around the corner, with just enough room for maybe 10 people to sit. We'd never been there, but decided to give it a go. Boy what a treat it was! Have a look at the homemade lemon tarts we ate!

The weather wasn't great, but it had just stopped raining so it wasn't too bad! We went into a park and walked around searching for nice places to take pictures. On the way I took some shots of some nice nature details!

And even a little Duck :-)

It was lovely walking around our neighborhood and seeing so many things we've never actually seen. It's crazy how you can live somewhere, and not know about all the nice places just footsteps from your own house. We talked loads, laughed even more whilst taking the pictures, and had a lovely morning!

So how about some pictures of my finished "Leftie"? Here they are.

Did I mention how much I love the colors? The Rowan Fine Tweed is a beautiful yarn, it's light but so very very warm. I love the texture of the garter stitch, and there's just enough color between the gray, to keep it from being boring.  I'm especially in love with the red!

Because of the garter stripes, it was quite a fast knit! Almost to the point of getting boring towards the end, because of the the endless rows of knit stitches. It was excited to get to one of the color rows every time, because I would have to focus a little again! I had a little difficulty understanding the short rows in the leafs, especially picking up 2 wraps at the same time, but it didn't turn out to be difficult at all! It's a very well written pattern, and quite easy to make! The shaping is very clever as well, starting from a corner, and working all the way across, until you have a big triangular shawl.

I've used a 100 grams of the gray color, and probably only about 10-15 grams of each of the other colors.

Here are some of the specifics!
Pattern: Leftie by Martina Behm
Needles: 2.5mm Circulars
Yarn: Rowan Fine Tweed
Color ways: Bainbridge, Malham, Nappa, Gunnerside, Muker, Skipton.
I've worked to a total amount of 26 leafs. I felt it was big enough at this point!
The only modification I've made, was to start the pattern with a leaf rather than a grey section.
I casted on 10 stitches and started on row 2 of the leaf pattern. 

In my other post about this shawl, I wrote about the fact that I find the pattern quite feminine. My challenge was to turn it into a shawl a man could wear. Not by changing the pattern, but by selecting some colors that felt right for me. It might not be the most manly shawl I've ever made, but I would definitely wear this every day. I love how it turned out!

Sorry for the photo overkill! I guess I'm just very happy with my new shawl and got a little bit too excited to share it with you all! It's a great project to make, and even nicer to wear. I'm very keen on using this yarn again for other projects, and saw that there's also a more worsted weight version of this yarn in pretty much the same colorways!

I wish you all a lovely week! And thanks for visiting :-)
Dennis x