Happily, Hemlock Ring only took two days to dry, and I was able to unpin her and get some beauty shots.

Here on the corner of the couch, you can get a much better idea of her size. She’s almost 60 inches across, which is perfect for draping across my lap in my office chair. It’s long enough to keep me warm, but not so long that I have to worry about it getting caught in the wheels of my office chair. As I mentioned the other day, it’s still quite cold here, and the office is one of the coldest rooms in the house, so I’ve already gotten some good use out of her.

It’s a surprisingly simple pattern. That centre flower isn’t hard if you take it round by round. And the the rest is just feather and fan, with the lace part worked only once every five rounds. You do need to pay attention to your stitches on that round (or you end up with the mess I had at first), but using markers on each pattern repeat, and counting stitches as soon as you’ve completed the repeat keeps problems from happening and then growing exponentially.

The cast off was a killer – again not hard once you got the rhythm of it.. but time consuming. It took me a couple nights to get it all cast off, but in the end, I have this lovely loopy, lacey edge.

The yarn I used was Alpaca with a Twist Highlander. It’s an Alpaca/Wool/Microfiber blend. It’s listed as an Aran weight, but it’s pretty darn close to a bulky. The pattern actually calls for a bulky yarn, so it was a decent substitute. And of course, the Alpaca makes it extra warm and fluffy. I ended up using just over 8 balls of it (approx. 1192 yards). I have almost one full ball left and I’m thinking it will make a nice hat.

The colour is Braeberry, and you can see it’s a nice dark, dusty blue. Blue is not a colour I would normally pick. This actually came from Mom’s stash. She gave it to me ages ago. And when I decided I was finally going to knit Hemlock (it’s been in my queue since the pattern first came out!), it was really the only thing heavy enough in the right quantity I had for it.

And since I was focused more on the warmth, I wasn’t really going to be picky about colour. But in the end, it really was perfect for it. The shade just helps to show off the stitches so nicely.

It’s definitely a knit that’s going to get a lot of use.

And not just by me…