Heartland Lace Shawl (Part one)

This began from a combination of events......first I had received an invite to a knit along for the Heartland Lace Shawl pattern. The original was done with buffalo down yarn since the pattern was created for a Buffalo Gold contest. It's a great pattern. A fun knit and quite flexible. At first I toyed with the very fun idea of just doing it well behind the group and spinning up my own yarn. That was a fun option and I might knit it again for that. But.....

The Estes Park Wool Market (EPWM) takes place Father's Day weekend. This year I was NOT going to go because I still have so much yarn and even more unprocessed fleece from my prior visits. I'm in the midst of reorganizing my fiber storage and so on and so forth. Realistically I knew if I went, I'd bring home at least another fleece or two. What to do? I was trying to behave, right? So.....to keep myself busy, distracted and pretending to be virtuous instead of climbing into the car and heading for Estes.....I decided to use a very pretty, hand-dyed 50/50 wool/silk fingering yarn I bought at the 2007 EPWM. It is, perhaps, not the best possible match for this pattern. It has been waiting for the right pattern to come along. This one works for me and it served it's bonus purpose well since I spent my weekend knitting instead of bringing home more to spin/knit. I am rather finicky about using hand-dyed, multi-colored yarns for much of anything, especially lace. I often love the colors, I just rarely think they work well for patterns. I do think that this one works pretty well though, so long as it's on a contrasting surface. The contrast, is however, quite necessary.....and works better when darker but white is what I had for these pictures. I'll see if I can't do something darker for the final pictures.

Some early in progress pics:

June 15 -


June 23 -