Rippling Silk

I've been on a bit of a knitting deadline the past few days. 

For the past year a skein of handspun silk laceweight has been along to all the shows, and I've finally turned it in to a shawl.

Aa you can probably tell it's extremely lightweight and floaty, of course, being silk it's also lovely and warm. I was a bit worried about the cast on as it seemed quite tight, but as I blocked it everything evened up, and it's made a beatiful crescent shape that will be really nice to wear. 

The yarn was spun from one of my hand dyed silk bricks, it looked something like this in fibre form.

I spun it up over Christmas last year, I won't lie, it did take a while, but was surprisingly easy to get nice and fine. 

The finished yarn didn't have much twist, in part that was intentional, as I didn't want thread, I wanted to keep the softness, it does lack a bit of plying twist though in places, however in the finished project you really can't tell. The long staple of the silk means you can get away with the lower twist and still end up with a yarn that's quite strong. I spun 890m from the 97g brick, and the finised shawl took a little over half of that, so not bad entertainment from £15 worth of silk!

The shawl itself is really hard to photograph, it's shiny so you get the light reflecting off it, and it's also quite see through, but this shot gives you an idea of the edging.

I fosee much more handspun silk shawls in my future because I'm thoroughly smitten with this one. If you want a closer look it will be on my stand at Yarndale this weekend, or indeed any of the other shows I'll be attending.

The pattern is called Longfellow by Carinea Ferguson, you can see more pictures of my version of it on my Ravelry project page.