Aspen Revontuli

Thank you so much to all who wrote encouraging and supportive comments and emails after the homeschool/public school post. The boys have been doing very well in their classes, with their teachers and the other students, and seem to be enjoying their days there. When they come home each day, I feel like I can truly be there for them; I have more patience, worry less about messes, and don't feel so overwhelmed. Overall, this has proved itself to be the best thing for our family right now, and, while we will continue to re-assess as time goes on, taking it year-by-year, we are very peaceful with our choices for this school year.

In other news...

In September 2007, the Spunky Club installment was 4 oz of Merino Tencel in a gorgeous colorway, Aspen.




When I was first pregnant with Billy, I started spinning it, and stretched it out into over 1000 yards of laceweight singles.




This past summer, on a road trip to a vacation resort in the Black Forest region of Germany, I started knitting it into the shawl, Revontuli. This shawl also traveled with me to Barcelona, Spain, on our flight from Germany to America in September, and during our first few weeks here in our new home in Texas.

All told, between the Bavarian Alps, Barcelona seascapes, cottony clouds out of an airplane window, and the cacti and heat of Texas, this shawl has a whole lot of life experience and memories knit into it.





The unblocked shawl looks like a beautiful tangle of seaweed to me.





I decided to knit one extra lace repeat so that the shawl would be a decent size for dramatic swishes, because everyone needs to feel like a superhero sometimes.





I used a 2-stitch Picot bind-off so that I wouldn't have any trouble stretching the shawl out to it's max while blocking.












Shawls tend to take a while in the making, but the beauty of it is that they carry so many moments of the knitter's life in their stitches. So many memories, emotions; it is so much more than just the sum of it's parts.





Shawls are often a splendid display of knitterly (and/or spinnerly) skill, but the grace of the piece, I think, lies in the unseen; the story between the twisted strands.