About a month ago I found myself in the enviable position of knitting two gorgeous shawls simultaneously! How lucky was I?! Here’s the story, morning glory:

It was really hard to settle on what I wanted to knit after finishing my Miter Madness Blanket. Sure I had a million projects on the needles, but I wanted something new and fresh. Something that wouldn’t take forever to finish. Then I fell in love with Romi Hill‘s Red Rock Canyon Shawl and started dreaming about it. Should I buy new yarn? But there is SO MUCH YARN in this house. I decided to stash dive and lo and behold I found a bunch of semi-solid colors of my beloved STR Lightweight. PERFECT! I actually settled on three colors, because much of my STR is older and my skeins only had about 360 yds and the pattern asked for at least 385 for both colors. I am so glad I went with three!

I used Passive Agressive Green for the main color, alternated stripes in Pond Scum and Sweet Pea, and did the lace sections in Sweet Pea. The three colorways worked GREAT together!

The Sweet Pea has a touch of yellow/green running through it and the Passive Agressive Green plays nicely with the Pond Scum. I love it! The shawl was also a very enjoyable knit. Do you like to purl? Then this shawl is for you! It’s a very textured shawl with lots of purling through the back loops. I personally love to purl so it worked well for me.

About a week or so after I started Red Rock, some old time knitbloggers started talking about doing a mystery shawl – you know the kind where you get a clue each week and you know vaguely what the project will look like – triangular shawl or whatever – but you don’t know until you knit it what it will really be? Yeah. One of those. Not only were they doing the mystery shawl, but most of the bloggers involved were doing it in Black Trillium Fibre’s Gradient Yarn – which I’ve been wanting to use for a while. You can guess what happened next – I cast on Kirsten Kapur’s (Through the Loops) Mystery Shawl in the Tidewater Gradient.

It was my first mystery knit, but it won’t be my last. I’m not one to knit stuff I don’t really like, so it was definitely a step outside my comfort zone, but I trust Kirsten implicitly and I absolutely LOVED the yarn. Add to it I was knitting along with some of my oldest blogger friends and it was like I was transported back in time. While I love Ravelry for what it can offer you in terms of knitting tips and tricks for patterns, there’s nothing like a real time knit along where everybody screws up and rips back and figures out how to get through the pattern together.

When I was done with a clue for the week, I would hop back over to my Red Rock Shawl. It worked out really well going between the two. There wasn’t as much confusion as I feared – as long as I didn’t mix up the charts I was good to go.

The tidewater colorway – a definite blue/green/teal sea color, has turned out to be kind of hard to photograph. Every picture came out too blue, and then adjusting it made it too green, but I think this is pretty accurate. I alternated between mini skeins (you moved onto the next color with each clue) for a row or two and when I was knitting it, there was a pretty well-defined stripe that I did not like, but now that it’s done and blocked, you can’t really see it. I’m very happy with how it turned out!

And now I have two new shawls – and a new way to wear them! For whatever reason (like I’m clueless sometimes) I didn’t think to wear this small-ish shawls like a cowl. I love cowls! So now I can’t wait to wear my new shawl/cowls. Bring on the cold weather! (Yes I said it. This summer hasn’t been so bad, but I am definitely more of a cold weather girl.)

Red Rock Canyon Shawl (raveled here.)

Knitblogger Reunion Shawl (raveled here.)

You know what’s funny? The Red Rock Canyon Shawl was originally one of Romi’s mystery shawl patterns! And I loved knitting these shawls so much, I started Germinate, by Kirsten Kapur, which was also one of her mystery shawl patterns!

I ask you, who doesn’t need a little mystery in their lives? Hope your Summer is filled with knitting and MYSTERY! Thank you for stopping by!

PS – Click on the pictures to see them bigger. They look so much better that way!