Fomhar

Having finished the last stitch of Cambria the day before flying back to California from my stay in Chicago, I of course had to spend the morning both packing AND starting a new project for the plane. As I'm sure I've said before, I can't stand not having something yarny to do on planes. It relaxes me in an otherwise stressful and unpleasant situation. 

Luckily, on a lark I took along one skein of Prairie on the off chance that I finished "that huge shawl project". Needless to say, I thanked my past self for the forethought even if it was done with kind of a "yeah right that's not gonna happen" sort of attitude. Take that, past self. 

A long, long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I bought this yarn from Knit, Purl in Portland to make a shawl from one of my books, but the collective wisdom on Ravelry had very few good things to say about the pattern when I got around to looking it up. I started a section and didn't love it, either. Not wanting to waste this yarn on a project I didn't think I would end up using, stitching stopped and it sat around waiting for quite a while until I found a suitable pattern to try next. This is now going to turn into a crocheted shawl pattern out of an Interweave Crochet magazine. While endeavoring to make from my stash this year I decided I should try to use my printed resources, too, so I get to feel good about two things. 

I'd been hankering for a single stick project to go along with all of those I have going with two sticks, so I wanted to find a good crochet pattern. Also, just look at the way those colors look! I'm not sure that just knitting it up would have the same lovely effect. Because of the way the yarn gets used up with each double or triple crochet stitch, the short and subtle color changes wrap over and under each other really giving the whole thing depth. If I'm not mistaken, fomhar is Gaelic for autumn/harvest. When this yarn is worked up it looks to me like a dappled autumn day. The color way is 'filigree'.

I finished a couple of rows of shells which doesn't look like much, but it's lace weight yarn! That actually is a lot of stitches. I haven't made much progress on this since that flight, but I was really trying to be good and get Dad's scarf made before I went back to it. This will be a project that moseys along at its own pace with no particular rush. I'd like to be able to wear it by next fall, so y'know that's time.