Milkweed Shawl Goes Out to Lunch (twice)

My sporadic blogging means I have been wearing FOs out and about without ever blogging them. Very bad form, I know. But let me show you one of my favorite FOs of the more recent past, the Milkweed Shawl designed by Laura Chau of Cosmicpluto Knits! I wore it on a blustery day this past week to take my knitting and work friend Elsie out to lunch to celebrate her birthday.

Elsie is wearing a sweater she knit herself in some Madeline Tosh worsted. I don’t remember the pattern, but one skein of the lot was much lighter than the others, so she made that the ribbing throughout the pattern. I think that worked out really well.

Then on Saturday, it was still blustery, and by that I mean gale force winds and heavy rain, so I wore it again on a shopping trip to Sacramento (otherwise short hair means a cold neck). I was eating a french fry when the below photo was snapped. I thought only M’s ice cream was in the frame.

When trying to buy lunch a three o’clock in the afternoon, there aren’t many options that aren’t fast food, but ice cream is almost always available. That’s M’s “Mountain of Ice Cream.” He chose spumoni and pistachio. I hate spumoni, so he gets that when we are out. My small vanilla ice cream with raspberries is so small in comparison to his mountain that you can’t see it sitting right behind. I did also have french fries. I love salty fries along side ice cream (not in the same bite). The ice cream place is Leatherby’s in Sacramento, and they make their own ice cream, and it is delicious.

But as for the Milkweed Shawl, I love how it turned out! It stays around my neck really well, and the slightly scalloped shape looks interesting and hangs well. I didn’t think I would like knitting all that garter stitch, but there was just enough else going on, and the look was so great, I didn’t miss purling.


The Handmaiden Casbah yarn in Stardust was absolutely fabulous. It is such a pleasure to knit and wear! And the soft grey-blues of the Stardust colorway allows me to wear it with a lot of other colors. The colors remind me of faded denim. They aren’t quite as bright as the shot on the back of the red sofa, but the colors do change with the amount and color of the ambient light.

I have another skein of Casbah, and I would like many, many more. This has to be a top 10 yarn for me. But with the one I have, in Rose Garden, I see another Milkweed. The pattern is great and the shawl is very wearable.

And I can’t resist a shot of M with his ice cream (he is also soaking wet from the rain). That really is a mountain of ice cream. I guess they gave him the two cookies, in case the ice cream was not enough. 😉