I finally finished my second Simple Yet Effective Shawl, which I started way back last March (as in 2010) immediately after I finished the first one. I don't feel too bad about the time lag, though, since it was the project on which I taught myself Continental knitting, so it was like learning to knit all over again. Also I've finished several projects in between (this is number five for 2011--my goal has been to finish one project per month this year; I've now fallen behind, but I haven't given up!). I got a significant amount of it done at baseball games this spring (it's antisocial to read or write at games, but you can talk and knit at the same time...only balls of yarn tend to fall down the bleachers).
At first I didn't like the way the colors came together (you take a skein of self-striping sock yarn and divide it into two balls, which you alternate for more/narrower stripse), but E and Z spent the last couple months of Kindergarten studying Ancient Egypt (I love their teacher), and because I'm a bit of an Ancient Egypt geek myself, we checked out all of the library books on the topic, and dug out all of my own books. After it was finished I realized these are totally the colors of Ancient Egypt, which I think tended toward the bright, verging on garish. So now I like it.
It came out much, much bigger than the first one, despite having the same amount of yarn. I think my Continental knitting is much looser than my old-fashioned stitches (though I do think my tension has both tightened up and evened out with practice).
And I do not feel compelled to start another one--finally got those stripes out of my system! My next (current) project? Another sweater (for me too)!
Pretty!
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