i had a whole bunch of stuff to show . . .

hmm. i’m a little cranky towards my new camera right now. not completely, but a little. i really didn’t have time to shilly-shally around today, y’know?
i just looked at the results of my picture-taking this morning and discovered it is mostly dreck.

i got in some blocking shots while the coffee cooked, in that blue light of the morning. a couple of those actually came out pretty well.
but then i went outside in the brighter light to photograph man lace progress and all sorts of things. you know, i can usually depend on the light in the yard to be great for photos. but not today; or at least, not with this camera. all those shots came out so blurry i can’t even use them.
well, except for the ones of the finished camSox, lurking in the wilds of my crazy garden bed

even this shot looks a little lackluster to me, color-wise. i’m having trouble getting the lighting right with this new machine. i’ll keep working at it—i’m sure it’s just some little setting that remains a mystery at the moment. this camera has a lot more settings to adjust than the old one did. i don’t mind—it’s just going to take a while to learn them all.

in the meantime, it does do detail. on a rather serious scale, too—look at this

that strikes me as being very, very sharp. and this

i happen to be completely smitten with this particular angle of the shawl at the moment. it’s sooo . . . delicate and at the same time soo shapely—kinda like a dancer’s leg, y’know? debbie was in love with the surface of it when she saw it sunday, and worried that the ridges made by the decreases would disappear with blocking. so this next shot is for her peace of mind.

doesn’t it look like a cashmere field? preliminarily, the statistics go something like this:
preblocking it was approximately 72 inches wide across the top and 34 inches long at the center. that was sunday night

i soaked it for about an hour in warm water, at which point it was completely malleable, and the water had just the slightest tinge of blue, in case you wondered about this yarn bleeding.
i pinned it out easily without needing to pull it much to measure 84 inches across the top and 38 inches down the center.

since the fabric is very soft and fine, i had to work with it a little extra to get the lines to lay straight; i think in the pattern i will recommend one needle size smaller than i used to get just a little tighter knit. i will also take out two repeats of the pattern, as i think this shawl might be bigger than some people would like. it can always be made bigger by increasing needle size and yarn weight a bit.

now here is where i feel a little frustrated! yesterday was my day to be at the shop all day and i got a ton of knitting done! besides finishing the camoSox, i knit some more length on to my starlight evening wrap. and then i came home and got started on the man lace and put a few inches on to that too! in addition, the other night i cast on for sox with the briar rose wine-colored yarn i showed a few days back. i decided to knit the cuffs in a waterfall lace pattern. but do i have pictures of any of that! no!

it’s not entirely the camera’s fault, believe me. i really did not have much time today to look at what i had taken early on, so it was dark before i discovered how bad the shots looked.
oh well—there’s always tomorrow; i’m going to need something to talk about. and maybe, i will even get david to take a few modeling shots with the shawl by then.