Overhaul

Since my last post (which has been a while, as you can tell by the date) we have fallen on hard times. DH has been out of work for close to ten months now, and things are not looking good. We are scrambling to make ends meet with the help of my inlaws, so buying yarn is not an option right now, and hasn't been for the past ten months. I have been forced to cut into my not so considerable stash which contains mostly polyester novelty yarns in baby colors. Yuck. My mother-in-law, who is a good woman and a good knitter but has no idea of yarn quality, told me the other day she would give me a bag of wool. It was pink and fuzzy, like mohair, she said. I was elated and started having visions of swallowtail shawls in a lovely dusky pink mohair to wrap around myself for warmth and comfort. Then I saw the bag, and my heart sank. It contained six skeins of Bernat Baby Lash in baby pink. Double yuck! I mentioned to DH I might put it up on Ebay, but he said his mother would want to see what I made with it. So I've hidden it in a seldom used closet until such a time where I can face up to knitting something that will look like half a dozen muppets had to die for it. So, dear kind mother-in-law, let me point a few things out to you here: yarn does NOT equal wool. Baby lash does NOT equal mohair. And polyester novelty yarn is about as far from wool as you can get. Sigh.

To keep myself from going nuts in a situation without prospects, I decided to tackle Evelyn Clark's Heartland Lace Shawl in, you guessed it, another polyester baby color yarn. I had a fairly large skein of unknown origin, it looks like a Red Heart sport weight, and I decided to just have a go at it to keep my hands busy. It also has my mind reeling, the pattern is impossible to memorize at least for me, but I am planning on making this shawl in a decent wool yarn once things take a turn for the better, and I am at least getting a feel for it this way. So no cool pictures of WIPs or FOs in this post. Stay tuned, who knows what is going to happen next!