Bitterroot

I got on a real finishing kick this week. I polished off the scarf that was lingering on the loom, washed/whacked/dried a skein of yarn, finished knitting a baby sweater for a friend and also finished the shawl I was working on last month!

I really love this shawl. It began in 2009 with two very different fibers. The first was a lovely, dusty rose and brown Merino, and the other was gorgeous pink and plum tussah. I wanted to combine the two, but didn't want long stretches of dusty brown in the mix, so I did a lot of prep on the Merino fiber. I broke the top at the color changes and sorted the pink from the brown. Then I stripped each section down and mixed them up so that there was one bit of brown with two or three bits of pink and pre-drafted them together to blend. I spun all of the top up and plied it over the three weeks of the 2009 Tour de Fleece. It came out to 950 yards of spindle-spun yarn! (Plus another 100 yards of leftover silk single which I just plied on itself this year.)

Here's the wool in its original form, and in the predrafted bundles I created:

 

And the tussah as I spun it up:

 

Because I was documenting for the Tour de Fleece, I have a lot of fun pictures of this project as it went along. They can be found in my 2009 Tour de Fleece Flickr set. Below are the finished singles of both fibers, wound off the spindle on to TP rolls for storage, and those same singles re-wound into a plying ball (half was already plied in this picture).

 

And last, but not least, the shawl itself. The pattern is "Bitterroot" (Ravelry link). I used all but five grams of the yarn, and almost 600 beads! It's huge and just exactly what I wanted it to be!