Grey Stripes

I've recovered my knitting nerve. I made a Stripe Study Shawl and I'm embarrassed by how much I like it.

The yarn I couldn't being myself to tell you about was a skein of Wollmeise Sock in Jung Maus, a wonderful blend of light greys.

I got it in a destash by lovely Linda, who pointed out that Wollmeise skeins are 150 grams and thus it's not an extravagance at all and is cheaper than, for instance, Lorna's Laces Sock, which you need to buy two skeins to make a pair of socks. This cheers me enormously, as you can imagine. I combined it with a skein of Dream in Color Smooshy in Black Parade, which is black with flashes of green and blue, but for some reason the blue looks green in the final result.

I ran out of that, so the last one-and-a-half stripes are done with Auricania Ranco in PT489, which is a semi-solid charcoal. 

This pattern is brilliant. I admired the shawl from the first time I saw it, but it was only when I started knitting it that the full cleverness dawned on me. On the return rows of the stripes, you keep wrapping and turning and going back to the beginning, so that one side of the V becomes hugely extended and flappy. This asymmetry continually made me think of a fiddler crab. 

It makes a very mathematical knit, which is always sort of exciting. There's another mathematical / optical thing that happens - what would you say is the 'main' colour? 

 When I started knitting, I saw the grey as dominant and it is described as the main colour, but as I went on I realized that there is more of the black - and yet, as you look at it, the grey becomes dominant again and the eye switches back and forth so that the two balance each other. When you look at a lot of the projects on Ravelry, you see the same thing.

 Please excuse the Monday Morning floor. I was going to soak it and dry it, without actually blocking it, but so far I can't stop wearing it. I went up two needle sizes from 4mm to 5mm and I expect it will grow, but at the moment  it is almost exactly the right size. I had thought that I might skip the final stripe in any future ones, but in fact I like this size and I don't think I would want it to be much smaller. Future ones? Well, at the moment I want to do several and I'm sure I will do one in blue and green, but after that we'll have to see.

The pattern is beautifully written and is possibly the best four euros I ever spent, although I did find the yarn requirements confusing. Presumably a lot of people did as many of the projects mention running out. I used 470 yards of the grey and a total of about 600 yards for the black.