Shawl and sock

Swatched for the Forest Canopy shawl at knitting morning on Saturday and got gauge with the needle size in the pattern.  I'm usually wildly off, could have been the cookie-and-hot-chocolate breakfast that day.  Messed up the second pattern repeat and had to rip out and restart on Sunday but it looks good.  The Kool-Aid yarn is nicely variegated.  It took a pattern repeat to figure out where I was in the shawl, hadn't realised you could start from the centre on the longest edge of a triangle shawl and work downwards towards the point.  Picked up a 29 inch bamboo circular for it and the cord is annoyingly curly.  I've done two of the ten pattern repeats so far.

Had a false start with the Panda Monkey socks too, did the green picot hem with too many stitches and had to redo.  Panda Cotton has four plies that don't bond well, rather than rip out I just cut the yarn and started over.  Changed to the pink variegated and made it through six repeats of the lace pattern.  I like the results, the lace pulls in a bit to keep the sock up.  Hubby says it looks very 1980s.  Crystal Palace is coming out with a Tulip colour, which is a more subtle version of the strawberry limeade I'm using.  I'm going to try a Sherman heel in green.

Crystal Palace is also coming out with a new sock yarn in the autumn, Maizy, which is made of corn fibre and elastic nylon, it will be interesting to see how corn feels.  Like the Indian Corn, Birch Bark, and Springtime colours.  Panda Wool is also on my list of things to try, but a lot of the colours look pale.