Going Green

New one is a collection of greens and beiges, sort of like my all beige one a while back, playtime with shading.

Here is the collection of yarns.

I'm using the Revontuli (Northern Lights) shawl pattern, one of my go-to patterns, as the basis. However, I'm playing around with adding garter and yarn-over rows to give it a less uniform look.

The pattern uses a notation system which I'm less familiar with, and every single time I start it, I get it wrong. However, I'm used to that by now, and it is easily discovered early on, so I just expect some kind of initial mistake anymore. 

Here's the start (after figuring the correct version out). One of the gratifying features of this pattern is that one makes progress at the beginning very quickly.

Here are some closer looks.

Here is how I like to do this pattern, to minimize the counting.

The red arrows point to my ring markers, red for decrease and blue for increase. (I use a mnemonic of the red being hot enough to melt the stitches together. Oddly enough, this works for me.) I put the red just before the middle stitch of the double decrease, and then move it each time. However, the blue is just before the middle stitch, and I increase on the stitch before the marker, then on the one past the middle stitch, so this marker just needs to be slipped each time.

The yellow shows the yarn tails woven in and out of the rows, to keep the markers from jumping off the needle.

I also use a marker between the first and second stitch of the right side row, and then weave the tail in on the increase row, and out on the two maintain rows. Then I can always look here to know if I'm supposed to increase or not.

So....no counting needed.

In theory, at least. Every once in a while I count between the markers just to make sure I didn't forget something somewhere. I usually have....so I just compensate in that row. This pattern doesn't need elaborate fixes, which is another wonderful feature of it.