The Featherweight Cardigan has been blocked. I still need to weave in the ends, and take a picture of course. It’s a little snug in the arms, but that’s to be expected, given that I made my non-preggo size and preggo-arms are bigger than that.

What’s next you say? Well, as much as I should be plugging away on the baby blanket (which is now somewhere in the 720+ stitches in a round range), I have decided I must cast on for something lace. I’ve decided on Ishbel, a lovely shawl that has 11,355 Ravelry projects. Whoa.

I started making this a couple of years ago and then quit on it for no good reason. I’ve chosen a different yarn, because I was previously knitting it out of some Araucania Sock that was a gorgeous color, but didn’t feel that great to knit with. Oh, and if you ever try to wind a ball of that stuff by yourself on a swift and ball winder…BEWARE. At the shop we’re always joking that it had to be put together by children. It’s a tangled mess. I even wrote the company about it once and got no response, after I struggled to wind three balls of the sock yarn and had to cut them in order to make them useable. I still haven’t knit up a single one of them.

Regardless, it seems I’m fairly long-winded this morning. This is the yarn I’ll be using for Ishbel.

It’s Lorna’s Laces Solemate. It’s color 310, Catalpa. The fiber content is 55% Superwash merino, 15% Nylon, and 30% Outlast. This is definitely more synthetic than I normally use in a project, so we’ll see how that goes. I was charmed by the color, and it’s definitely still very soft.

Since it’s a project with a good amount of lace, I wanted to check and see if the color changes would outshine the lace. An easy way to do this is check the color contrast in a black and white photo. I saw this a couple of years ago in the book Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarns and was reminded of it again in this post.

From the picture, it looks like there won’t be hugely dramatic color changes, so I’m going to forge ahead.

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