More than halfway

I've been working almost exclusively on the North Sea shawl for the last week or two, and look: I've finished the first half and the center panel! The pattern then calls for putting that bit on a holder - hello, fabulous KnitPicks Options needles - and knitting the main pattern all over again from the other end. Then there is a lot of grafting. I'm about nine rows into the other side, so it'll take a while, but I'm hoping to have it done in the not-too-distant future.

I'm afraid I've ripped out the very few rows of the pink-orange-purple StR Jaywalkers and decided to do something different with it, though I'm not sure what yet. Thanks to the cool rainy weather, I was feeling more mellow, and decided to save that yarn for sometime when I need a pick-me-up. Instead, I've switched over to the gray Regia Silk I bought at Mew Mew's a while back. I opened up Sensational Knitted Socks to look at the pattern I want to make ("Oblique Openwork"), and it fell open to her provisional cast-on technique. Which is brilliant! I'd always just made a crochet chain and then picked up from there, but she does this clever thing of crocheting over the needle, and it worked very nicely.

Lately I've been working my way through the Enchanted Forest Chronicles and the Cecelia and Kate series (same page). They're tremendously fun books, if you like books about princesses running away from home and rescuing dragons. :)