Christmas part 3 and my mystery project!

I figured, before i gushed about my New Year endeavor, I should probably show you all what happened with all the Christmas knitting. I ended up making a snake-and-mouse combo for my nephew (at his request) The snake is designed to swallow the mouse, which it did do successfully several times. However, the mouse, my nephew discovered, was really a Kung Fu mouse, and he had a ball whipping around by its tail (thank goodness the thing was so securely knit on it could never come apart!). I also had a little extra time and made him a bat as well, from a pattern I'd used successfully earlier this summer. It was an even faster knit since I'd made one before, and i finished the entire thing on Christmas Eve. of all the things i did, i think that impressed my dad the most!

Here's the menagerie:



A while ago, I stumbled across a lace-shawl designer named MMario and fell in love with many of his shawl designs. They are fantastic, but look so complicated that i have never dared to try one. He has a real penchant for theming his shawls on various fantasy series and has a number of shawls based on HP as well as Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, just to name a few.

Well..............when MMario announced last fall that he was going to be hosting a "mystery shawl knit-along" starting Jan 1, I just couldn't resist. What better time to learn how to do lace than with a knit-along, where I could get help from the other participants and where everybody would be more-or-less at the same pace, as the clues would be spaced out weekly???

MMario gave us preferred yarn colors and thickness, and told us that beads would be optional. I rather ignored the thing about beads - i figured, why complicate things?

Ha.

I ordered my yarn just as soon as i got my first paycheck from my new job; i'd spent weeks scoping out yarns all over the internet to find just what i wanted, and it was too expensive to get otherwise. Unfortunately, that meant that it didn't arrive in time for new years, when the first clue was released. I contented myself with "practicing" the first clue with yarn i already had, just to get the feel for how it worked. and i watched.

I watched all the other participants talking aobut their beads and how to do that, and what kinds of beads. I watched their examples start to be posted as they finished the first clue. and man. it looked SOOO COOL with beads. so.......while i was waiting for the yarn, i started looking at beads too. dumb, really, because without the yarn in hand, picking the right color of beads was like reaching blindfolded into a bag. I ended up ordering some inexpensive beads in 3 different colors. none of them, it turned out, worked with the yarn i got. instead, i found some even more inexpensive beads at JoAnn fabrics yesterday.

duh! moral of the story: CURB YOUR IMPULSES!

anyway, I finished knitting Clue one today. Clue 2 came out on Thursday, and I should have that done by the end of the weekend, i hope.......

Here's what it looks like so far: (Many other people stretched out the knitting with pins as it will be at the end when we block it, but I am not set up to do that, so it is a bit curled up on itself at this stage)(TIP: Click on the pic to see the closeup with the beads)



this is fun!