Finished, in progress, almost begun

The I finished the wine coloured Urchin first thing this morning and it is now blocking/drying on a dinner plate. I'm pleased with ow it came out but I feel it is missing a little something. I'm going to look for some ribbon or a button or something to jazz it up a bit.

In the meantime I'm plugging away at the shawl. I just finished the fifth repeat which means I'm 30% finished. It also means that the shawl is now more than half its final length and width. It actually looks like a shawl. This is when it pays to remember that half the length is not half the shawl. I will be knitting this for a while yet.

Since Christmas is starting to appear on the horizon, the shawl won't be my only knitting on the needles (and I'm not referring to the two sweaters that are lying abandoned). After doing some swatching with my green hand spun I realized that a) I really like how it look in garter stitch and b) I don't have enough to knit the shawl/lap blanket. My solution was to take some white and green marl yarn (dk weight) that I got at the big NDG destash and dye it to match the hand spun.

In the original version of this shawl the center was hand spun and the border was mill spun. My plan for this version is to have the center mill spun and the border hand spun. Now that I have all of the yarn dyed up and dry I should be casting on any day now.