This week has been all about blues and grays – one skein of Mushishi, and a navy blue Cascade. Same shaping as the Drachenfels shawl, but a very different feel with an allover stripe.

At first, I didn’t think I’d like the stripes – the two yarns seemed too similar to work well. But, as I knit on I found the lighter parts of the skein, and I found that I really liked the pairing of subtle variations with a single, constant color. It’s hard to go wrong with blues and grays.

The purple and rainbow shawl has been slow in starting, in part because I am dithering about what to do. It’s hard enough for me to knit a simple pattern once, never mind three times in a row without changing something significant. And, one of the reasons that this skein ended up in deep stash was that I wanted it to be something “special.” (Too nice to be used up, and so it never gets used…).

I spent some time this week sketching around with some swatches. Trying to switch up the shaping turned into a lot of short rows.

Which made a few interesting shapes as I knitted my way through a few iterations.

This one might have been going somewhere, maybe.

But I finished the blue shawl this afternoon, and tomorrow is Monday, so new knitting is more important than fancy knitting. I do have a tickle at the back of my brain that says short row rainbow wedges would be fun, but for now, I’m going with stripes.

I’m not sure how I feel about it yet – this is the most blindingly bright end of the skein, but I’m hoping it will balance out a bit when the calmer colors come in. We’ll see how it goes. If I don’t love it, I’m not afraid to rip, and this way I still have knitting to start the week.

We’ve had terrible photo weather around here lately, but I did convince the dressform to do some modeling for me. Lots of color around here these days!