First I thought you might enjoy seeing how spring is progressing here. Today there are 3 boats moored just below us, a sure sign that summer is coming. The new sprouts of the knotweed have started to grow so soon the old stalks will no longer be visible. The birds love that thicket of stalks so we leave them. I know knotweed is an invasive species, but when confined as we have this patch (which we did not plant), it seems a reasonably good thing.
I was thinking last night about the days when I was first learning to cook whole meals and what an overwhelming task it was to have everything ready at the same time. Yet today, I don't even think about it and everything is ready when I need it. Somewhere a long the way I learned the art of juggling ingredients and times so that now it is second nature to me and seems effortless.
My knitting is kind of like that. There was a time, waay back when, that I had to knit just one thing at a time because of the level of concentration I needed in order to make what I was attempting. But as I gained experience and skill, that fierce level of focus was no longer required and I began to be able to juggle several projects at once. And in fact, having several at a time seemed overall to facilitate all of them as I could move from one to another as I got bored or frustrated with any given project. It is not a case of short attention span theater for me. For me it is a kind of energy that comes from having multiple options available to keep me inspired by my projects.
In that spirit, here is the beginning of my Slow-Bee shawl. I am using raspberry extrafine merino from Colourmart, which I learned is Baruffa Cashwool. It is delightful yarn in any case. I am using a mixture of red beads on it.
Here you can see how I load beads onto my piece of SuperFloss, which has become my method of choice when adding beads --
And the knitting itself --
I am making it for a friend and have doubled the width of the rectangular panel in the back as she needs extra width there. I like this pattern.
I had a cancellation this afternoon so I will be working on charting the center motif of Medea. And I will post pictures of her so far tomorrow.
Spike finds all of this satisfactory --