I am wondering why it is that so many great events happen on the same date? This weekend I am going away for the Upper Midwest Bead Society’s bead retreat. Which is a very good thing. A long weekend of just beading or doing what I want to do. All for the very good price of $80. You just can’t beat that with a stick. I am very happy. But now this a.m. I received an email notice that the folks at Needlework Unlimited are getting a major shipment of Koigu in on Friday at 10:00 a.m. I really really really want to make the Charlotte Shawl. Nobody in town (up till Friday) has had a good selection so I have resorted to dinking around with photo swatches to determine what 5 colors I want to purchase.
Okay so now to add insult to injury, there is also this cool festival that is going on this weekend too. This is one I am really sick about because it would be so great to get away with WT and go to The Warrens Cranberry Fest. I heard from one of the vendors at the WI fiber thang that this event is fabulous. Dang, dang, dang.
I guess I could always schedule this cranberry fest for next year. And check with Needlework Unlimited next week to see if there is any Koigu left – perhaps buy some stuff to get me started. They also mentioned in their email that they will be selling Koigu by the gram. What they do is sell the bits of leftovers from projects. Interesting.
So what I need to do is start getting together my projects that will come along with me to the retreat. Even though this is a beaders thang, and I am a beader, I will be taking along my spinning wheel and some knitting projects too. I always have a hard time deciding which beads to bring so all of them will be coming along. Add to that the wheel and the fiber and the patterns and books and needles=many many trips back and forth to the car and then getting all that stuff into the work area. Oh, and clothes and bedding, and my camera too. Bead retreat exercise drills!
I realized I never shared a pic of the WI fest booty. Here it is:
And while I am at it, here are some pics of my finished landscape shawls.
More about this shawl. I remember telling you that I had modified the scarf shaping (included in the pattern) and used that on the shawl so that I would get it to wrap along the shoulders morel, ala Faroese shawls. Here is a close-up of the shaping.
I sharpened the image so that you can see that if you look along the stitch line, I have made the shaping sharply decrease along each YO line. This little bit of extra at the ends really makes a big difference. When I have the shawl on you wouldn’t notice the bending effect of the pattern. It just stays put on the shoulders and looks nice.
Also, the blue landscape shawl is different from the original pattern in that I just used garter and seed stitch.
ZenKnit 
The shawls look great, Susan! I’ve been to the Cranberry Fest in Warrens and I’d definitely recommend it. I’m CRAZY about cranberries, so I may be a little biased. There’s the obligatory cranberry food, as well as other fair-type fare. There are a ton of vendors – lots of crafty stuff and lots of “antiques”. Those aren’t my cup of tea, but I liked the crafty stuff and bought a few things. My favorite part was the tour of the Ocean Spray plant. It’s not a festival I go back to every year, but it’s definitely worth checking out. Have fun at the bead retreat!