Finished Japanese Feather and Fan Shawl, and delicious cake

Huzzah! An FO!*

*FO means 'finished object' in knitter parlance, and refers to, well, a finished knitted or crocheted item :)

Ravelry page
Started: April 12, 2009
Finished: June 15, 2009
Yarn: 1 skein Buffalo Gold #12 Lux (45% Bison, 20% Cashmere, 20% Silk, 15% Tencel ), colorway Pine; 1/4 skein Knit Picks Shadow (100% merino wool), colorway juniper heather

There were only 330 yards in the Buffalo Gold skein (which I won in a raffle - I would never have bought it myself), so I used a little bit of some coordinating Knit Picks Shadow lace yarn for the edge, which I think gives it a nice ruffley border effect.

Previous blog posts:
The yarn
What I'm working on
Burnout
Binding off

I am very happy with it! I wore it yesterday, but forgot to take pictures of myself. I'll take some later :) I have a lovely costume pin that I got from One of a Kind Wisconsin that I'm using to hold it in place, and then I also have a copper swan-shaped shawl pin from REminders that I'm going to use with it also.

Japanese Feather & Fan is a great pattern, because it looks much more difficult than it actually is. It's a variation on the classic Feather and Fan lace pattern, which is one of the simplest and most common lace patterns there is. This shawl pattern is a semicircular shawl devised by Izzyknits, and available for free via Ravelry. My only modification to the pattern was to do it in 6 sections instead of 8. As written, the pattern creates a more-than-half-circle shawl, but because I was working with limited yarn, I knit more or less an exact half-circle.

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Yesterday I baked a cake for my mother's birthday. Happy birthday mom!


It's a Chai butter cake, which is absolutely delicious and very interesting! I found it on Metafilter, where MeFi user dejah420 shared the delicious chai cake recipe with us. It's simple too! The only special ingredients you need are the chai spices (experiment with your spice cabinet until you get something that smells like chai: I used cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg and ginger) and some green tea for steeping in buttermilk, which gives it that tea flavor.

I iced it with cinnamon and vanilla icing (ie, some store-bought icing that I mixed a little cinnamon into) and added strawberries. It was a big hit. I love baking!

~Joyuna