Mystery Knit-A-Long

The Rose City Yarn Crawl Mystery Knit Along continues. In fact, today is the release of the last clue.  With that in mind, I decided to post the progress I have made thus far on my shawelette. I even made some modifications on clue #3 that I will explain when we get there. 

The first clue set up the shaping and featured some raindrops. I added in some beads. My apologies for the color in these two shots. 

Clue #2 began with some really fun stripes of the two colors and ended with some roses (I added the same beads in this section). The blending of these two colors is really something. These are not typical colors, so getting to play with each color on its own, and then the combination is really fun for me.

Here you can somewhat see the first two clues, and the color play between the scarlet and honey colored yarns. I like the high contrast, if I were to change this photograph to grayscale, then the colors would appear to be very close to black and white. In color, its just a bit softer than black and white (which is another knitter's color combination and it is excellent!). 

The 3rd clue is more stripes. The designer mentioned when the clue was released that this section could be as many as 50 rows. I started thinking that I wanted to play with the honey colored yarn more. So I worked out how to incorporate the stripes and roses. 

I came up with using only 10 rows for the roses (the original roses have 14 rows with some extra stockinette on either side), and then distributed the remaining 40 rows into stripes. For some reason, I got it in my head that each progressive section of stripes should be smaller. So in clue #2, there were 8 stripes of each color. In clue #3, the first section of stripes was 6 stripes each, then 4 stripes each. 

The fourth and final clue outlined both leaves and a nice garter stitch ending to the piece. Above is what a piece of knitting with some lace an other elements looks like before you give it a bath. It can be hard to see what you are looking at without some experience and pulling.

After the bath, I pull out the wet piece of loveliness, wrap it in a towel, and lay it out on my blocking mats. Along that top straight edge, I have a couple of thin blocking wires to hold that edge straight (way easier than a million pins). Then a pulled out each of the little points starting at the top and working my way down. Its certainly not a science, and sometimes I go back and readjust how much pull there is, but the end result is that this piece will hold this shape and not the lumpier shape I showed you above.

The only modification I made to the last clue was I knit the entire clue in scarlet, because I wanted to sort of bookend the entire piece. I thought I gave some color symmetry.