I Created The Blob

Last night I finished the Hemlock Ring Shawl from Jared's blog. I joined my first KAL with this shawl and the comments have been helpful. I started knitting The Blob on Sept 15. When the shawl was about 1/2 way out from the center I had a nagging suspicion that something wasn't quite right. Apparently in denial, I kept knitting to the bitter end, including the tedious lace edging (not that tedious really, just not as fun as the other part). Last night I knew I should have listened to my gut and stopped about 10 days ago. I have knitted enough lace to know. Nonetheless, I hopefully carried The Blob with the materials necessary for blocking it to our guest bed. Right away I could see that no amount of blocking was going to turn this Unhappy Amoeba into anything useful or beautiful. There are bubbles and ruffling occurring where there should not be. My guess is that (1) I should have knit on a larger needle to allow for more stretching and (2) Alpaca is perhaps not as forgiving and elastic as wool. As soon as The Blob dries completely I am going to unravel it. I still want to do this project but I may choose a different yarn. Jared, who started this mania, used Cascade Eco Wool. His shawl is beautiful! Any thoughts/suggestions on my Unhappy Amoeba, aka The Blob, are appreciated!

Hemlock Ring and Teddy Bear Update

I'm zipping right along on my Hemlock Ring Shawl. The alpaca is wonderful to work with although it is rather slippery. I'm on row 57 or thereabouts, trying to decide whether I will expand the shawl beyond what Jared did. I might want mine a bit larger.

Our prayer shawl ministry team met on Wednesday evening. We took a rough count of the number of bears already made by those attending and came up with 50! We know there are other bears out there, too. The mission trip has been postponed until next summer due to the shortage of materials, specifically concrete. They cannot build without cement. So we are planning on mailing these bears to Zimbabwe to our contact there. Then we will make another batch when the team goes to build the church.

I know I'm supposed to tag some people with the middle name game and will get around to that. It's going to be a busy weekend because I have to work all day tomorrow.