Knitting or Cat Hairball?

Biggest Hairball Ever
See this? My daughter has a cat named Sootsie who is this exact color, a cat who aches to bite me every time I visit, and he has to be caged while I’m there—but I didn’t grind him up into this hairball. Honest.

This, believe it or not, is a Kidsilk Haze lace shawl in the color Smoke. Two balls worth. Fresh washed for blocking. Scary, isn’t it?

Here’s what it looks like finished. Phew!

Jill's Shawl Done

I made it from the lace shawl/scarf pattern called “Nelly” as a Christmas gift for my daughter. She loves it. Maybe not quite as much as that cat, but she likes it enough to wear it to a party.

In fact I made four of these things for Christmas, in four different colors. It was insanity. They were my first experience with kidsilk haze. I had real difficulty at first getting used to knitting such fine yarn. My needles were too slippery at first. When I finally used bamboo needles, the knitting went much better. What really clinched it though was the thought, “I’m knitting cobwebs.” When I realized that, suddenly I was able to knit it like I knew what I was doing.

As my first post on my knitting blog, I suppose I should have introduced myself, but I couldn’t resist using this picture. Those are my hands. The rest will come later.

I know the world likely doesn’t really need yet another knitting blog, but *I* need to do this. I want more knitting in my life. I want to track what I knit so I can come back and see what I’ve done. What if I want to knit something similar in future? I can find the info about it here far more easily than I could any other way.

Not to suggest my house is a mess. Suggest, heck. I’ll say it right out loud. In this house, when I put something down, it vanishes under other stuff that pounces on it. I swear.

Not like that cat of my daughter’s likes to pounce on me and gobble me up, but close enough.