On (and off) the Hook: Go Blue! Afghan

Have you ever wondered, "Could I make an entire afghan in 9 days?" Apparently, for me, that answer is yes. I started this afghan officially on July 4th and finished it yesterday. (Why the clarification of "officially", you might wonder? Well, I tried two other patterns and two other hook sizes before I finally settled on this pattern and hook size, which means I technically started the project on June 30.)

I used ~3500 yards of Numma Numma's Texas Toasty yarn in Blue Corn Masa; I doubled the yarn and used an 8mm "L" hook. (And yes, picking a hook size was a bit of a Goldilocks process: the N was too loose, the K was too tight, and the L was just right.) The pattern is Plain and Simple from Quick and Cozy Afghans; it's a pretty straightforward pattern to memorize and debug, and I just love the scalloped edges (which are sort of the inverse of each other-- see photos below).

My finished afghan is about 43" wide x 55" long. I increased the pattern widthwise by one repetition because I thought it wouldn't be wide enough. I haven't blocked it yet, but it looks like it'll grow quite a bit lengthwise when I do.

   

On the Needles: Mediterranean Lace part 2

The above photo is what my Mediterranean Lace shawl looks like after I picked up the stitches around its perimeter for the border. I never realized how painful a process that would be, but now, 1,108 stitches later, I've got the foundation for my border. I had all the math worked out so I'd make the body of the shawl the right size; the original pattern called for 2 stitches picked up for every 3 pattern rows, so in order to keep that ratio, I ended up making the shawl 22 repetitions + 20 extra rows.... for a total of 89,676 stitches. And when it came right down to it, I didn't do a particularly great job of keeping with the 2 out of 3 ratio, but I think it ended up OK (tip for anyone else doing this pattern: once you've gotten one side done, put locking stitch markers on the other side to make the picking-up process a little easier). With 26 repetitions of the border pattern, I'm using just about every stitch marker I own. Oh, and I dropped down to size 1 needles for the border (was using size 2 for the body); the pattern called for a size 0, but all the reports I'd read from other people's shawls indicated that going down two needle sizes could be problematic.

Here's what it looked like all stretched out on my red striped rug, just before I started picking up stitches for the border. Unblocked, it measured about 58" long. I was worried that it might be too short (which is why I did so many repetitions of the body pattern), but now that I see it all stretched out, I realize that it'll be just fine.

On the Table: Gooseberry Jam

One of my favorite things about summer is making jam, and I finally got back in the swing of things last weekend with the gooseberries pictured above, purchased at the local farmer's market. As usual, Christine Ferber's's excellent Mes Confitures provided the recipe, which consisted of about 2 pounds of gooseberries, sugar, and lemon juice.