Two knitting projects

I finished this shawl just before the recent California trip, but didn't block it until I got back. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and it is totally a Thing For Me. I bought the copper silk lace several years ago on a previous California trip (all trips involve visiting local yarn stores), but I never had the perfect thing for it until I saw this particular pattern - the fans in the lace look very gear-like to me, and the lace yarn shines like copper wire in bright light, so this is my Steampunk Copper Clockwork shawl. I even bought a black dress to wear it with. :) None of the pictures really capture the copper-shiny effect, but you can imagine it. Oh, and I really like the pattern - the confusing magical cast-on, the as-you-go mini-lace edging around the front edge, and the gorgeous final lace. I had extra yarn, so I added a bit of length, but in retrospect I think it would have been fine without it, and kept the edging out of scrunching into my elbows when I bend my arms. Oh well.



The socks are much less exciting, but the picture is better. (Socks nearly fit on a scanner, with some Photoshop to munge two pictures together). I really love the multicolored Pigeonroof Studios yarn, but it's hard to figure what to do with it. Just plain stockinette socks (or something like Skew, which is stockinette in a funny arrangement) are fine, though that makes all the muliticolor changes into little horizontal lines. This texture turns the color changes into an interesting muddle, which I think works surprisingly well.