Angelus at last!

Finally!!!  Today I can share with you the project that bumped Dearli off the needles last month (not literally, though it almost did as they are written for the same size…)!  I present…

The Angelus Shawl, by Emma Galati of Everything Old Fibre!!!

Oh yeah, it’s awesome!  More pics and prattle under the jump!

I was privileged to be one of the test knitters for this pattern and it’s been really hard to keep it under wraps all month!  First off, I want to tell you that this was my first garter-stitch shawl, a form I’d always avoided because I assumed I’d find it boring.  However, unlike rectangular lace shawls (where it turns out I was totally right about how boring they are to me), I was extremely pleasantly surprised by how fun and fast I found this one – I’m sure the stripes helped, as did the cool slip-stitch columns (which gave me a bit of trouble at first, but I quickly got into the swing of them).

Annnnnd now that it’s done, it’s so squishy and amazing I want to wear it every day!  Except that that would be a bad idea, what with the whole nanny-to-a-toddler situation at work (This week?  No yogurt on my jeans yet, but you don’t even want to know where I just found playground sand…!).

I chose the yarn before I found out the name & inspiration for this shawl, so it’s interesting to me that I gravitated to something light and something dark, like the nature of Angel/Angelus, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (spoiler warning).  The dark yarn (it’s black, intermittently shot through with blue, and I desperately want some more to do another Christmas Lights shawl) is Fleece Artist BFL.  The light yarn is my own handspun, from Merino/Bamboo fibre in a colourway called Metallurgy…which I bought from, you guessed it, Everything Old!  Okay, I have a sick adorable fondness for using a fibre artist’s own fibre/yarn to knit their patterns.  So I started spinning in late August and was carrying my spindle box full of fibre around to all the yarn stores in town trying to find the right match.  At first, I was less sure of the match as I was knitting than I had been looking at skeins side by side…the high contrast seemed to eat all the subtle shots of colour in my handspun.  But the knitted-on edging really brings it out, I think, although what you see in the photos here is but a pale shadow of what the eye detects.

What a gorgeous edging, too!

I did this entirely without a cable needle, although I admit I resented how much it slowed me down and kept thinking I should really grab a darning needle (my favourite cabling option, not just for dolly stuff) so I’d never have to squirm around trying to catch a stitch that was threatening to drop.  I also worked the WS rows backwards, and it was so nice not to have to turn the whole shawl over after only 18 stitches!  Unfortunately, I think my gauge is a teeeeeeeny bit looser working backwards than forwards, which isn’t a problem in terms of the look of the shawl, but it meant that the 345 yards of handspun I had very nearly wasn’t enough!  I actually got to the end, ran out of yarn about 1.5 rows from finishing, and had to rip out and re-knit the last 6 or 8 rows a bit tighter, finally finishing with about 4″ of yarn to spare!  At least I was saved from having to figure out what to do with a scant handful of yards of beautiful leftover handspun (although I am totally doing this when I next run into that particular problem)!

I also just want to mention how much fun I had dressing up for this shoot!  When I wore the shawl to knit night, Em commented on how well it matched my outfit (or rather how well my outfit matched it!)…little did she know, I have enough black-and-lilac clothes to match this shawl for a week!  For the photo shoot, I busted out my still-pretty-new Domino Dollhouse Merengue Petticoat.  If you’re even remotely plus-sized and you even slightly like the full-skirt look, whether in a vintage pinup way or a gothic lolita way or a floofy raver princess way or whatever, I cannot recommend this petticoat highly enough!  It’s incredibly soft and so full, and it spins like gangbusters!  And they make it in ten colours.  TEN.  I think I want them all.  Anyway, now that I’ve finished knitting this gorgeous shawl, my next big excitement is going to be picking out an outfit to wear with it to Knit City in Vancouver!  Well, that and finally getting back to my Dearli cardigan, of course!

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