Posing in the sunshine...

...with my beautiful finished shawl. It turned out just as I had hoped: wide enough to stretch out to the tips of my fingers, delicate and light but not flyaway thanks to the hundreds of tiny glass beads that were such a pain to knit in. They were worth it. They give the whole shawl just a slight shimmer in the light, exactly what I was aiming for. It's rare that you get to complete something that turns out so perfectly in accord with what you had imagined. I love it.

Pattern: Forest Canopy Shawl by Susan Pierce Lawrence. Yarn: Mama Ocllo Alpaca laceweight in Peacock Heathers, from Knitncaboodle, purchased at the Knitting and Stitching Show at the NEC, 13th september 2008. (Start to finish in six weeks. Wow! Can't believe it!) 2 skeins (9g left). Pattern mods: I made the shawl larger by knitting lots more repeats - 26 repeats of chart 2, 27 repeats of the leaf motif in total. I also added small clear glass beads at the end of each leaf motif on row 2 of the repeat, the plain knit row, and on each knit row of the edging chart on the points.
Here it is in the garden: compare this with the same shot of the first FCSS shawl I made, in August 2007. This one is quite a bit bigger, and much finer yarn, so there are millions more stitches in this one! Some details:

... and the point...

And that's not all! I had to have something to knit last night while it was blocking, didn't I? That got the second of these monkeys to the toe, and I finished it up and grafted it this morning! I also had to fix two moth-created holes in the first sock: one at the end of the toe by unravelling and reknitting 4 rows, and the other, on the gusset decreases, by darning it with duplicate stitch as neatly as possible. I made quite a good job of it, actually. And now they're blocking...
Is anyone keeping count? That's five of my 6 UFOs from my list! Plus it's all 4 of the pairs of socks I wanted to finish in Socktoberfest! Overachiever, me! Sadly it may be down to not having enough work, but even if we can't afford to eat this winter, we'll have warm feet.

Maybe I'll just have to grow some feathers... these guys never seem to feel the cold! You can see them looking confused as I dance around in my new shawl though. Humans are odd creatures...