swatch!

I've been randomly busy with a lot of things lately, the most of exciting of which is definitely the Design Your Own Shawl class I'm taking from Stefanie Japel.* The material is self-paced, which is really great for my randomly insanely-busy one day, quiet the next schedule, and while I've been too busy to get as far as I would have liked though the videos and the readings, I still feel like I'm learning a lot. Above is a shot from a proto-swatch - not sure if this will be the stitch pattern I eventually use for the shawl, or not, but it was without a doubt the biggest swatch I've ever knit. I do, grudgingly, knit swatches for other projects, but I rarely make them as big as I'm supposed to - so I appreciate that the class is allowing me to move more slowly, rather than run off too fast, as I am often otherwise prone to doing :-) 

* Which makes me feel a bit star struck, if I'm honest; hers was one of the first knitting blogs I ever read, and I backpacked all over the UK two years ago with a copy of her v-neck sweater pattern in my oversized backpack. I didn't knit it, because the yarn got tangled up in the zipper of the backpack, but I will someday, I swear.