Dragon Tooth Shawlette - Cast On

Yesterday Bruce and I were out running a couple of local errands and we were talking about Christmas presents.  We don't do much in the way of presents.  We have a small family gathering with his side of the family in St. Augustine, where is mom lives, so we only have to get a handful of presents, well 6 to be exact.  For his mom, son and brother we're going to get something practical, but for his daughter, daughter in law and sister in law I thought I would raid my stash and my jewelry box.  Two projects immediately came to mind for his daughter and sister in law - both knitters.  Both projects are ones that I had gotten the yarn for without first looking at the yarn content.  They call for the same yarn type, and it is 50/50 wool/alpaca.  I don't do alpaca, it makes my hands feel funny, almost like I'm about to have an allergic reaction, but I never handle it long enough to get there.  So when we got back from our errands I tracked down the yarn.  One set had been entered into my stash, but the other one hadn't so I had to dig that one out of the "to be stashed" pile.  I went ahead and caked it up, printed out the patterns and packed up a couple of gift bags.  I'll probably gift them the pdfs via Ravelry.

But, while I was doing that it occurred to me that I had the perfect yarn for one of the patterns sitting out on my project table in my studio.  The yarn is Squooshy by Zen Yarn Garden and I had pulled all the skeins in my stash out when I was looking for yarns for multi-colored shawls.  So I caked that skein up and loaded the pattern into knitCompanion and cast on.  It is one of those one skein shawlettes that you knit from the bottom edge up, so you have to cast on a lot of stitches.  I like a long tail cast on, and don't like working from both ends of the skein at the same time (tried that once on another project), and I'm reasonably good at estimating how much yarn I will need, and I don't mind taking more than one try to get there.  I came up just a little short on the first go, but easily made it the second.  I also looked through my stash and think I've found yarn for the other project.  Even though I have a couple of other WIPs going I wanted something small, easy and reasonably quick to knit.  This pattern was inspired by the show Game of Thrones.

Pattern:  Dragon Tooth Shawlette by Amy Loberg
Yarn:  Zen Yarn Garden Squooshy in Twilight
Needle:  US 6 (4.0 mm)