Queensland Collection Rustic Tweed

I love tweedy yarns. There's something so very satisfying about their small flecks of colors bursting from the main plies of the yarn. These blobs give a bit of a different texture to the yarn but also to the knitted project, providing depth and dimension.

In my usual fashion, I've collected a bunch of tweedy yarns. Collected isn't really the right word. I've snatched them up gleefully at yarn stores. Spurned their plain cousins. Hoarded them with delight. And I haven't really knitted with any of my darlings yet--because I needed the right project.

The problem is, there's also something sort of utilitarian about tweedy yarns. Sure, they're flecked and delicious. But they're usually on a base of something very straightforward. Like these suckers:

Queensland Collection Rustic Tweed. A DK yarn that I picked up on sale at my LYS because TWEED. On a lovely teal (turquoise?) blue base, but it's pretty straightforward. No variegations. No melded tones of blue shading from one to another like liquid sky.

Anyway, I spent a long time with these in stash. They were beautiful, but they weren't ever quite what I wanted to be knitting. Instead I did things with lace, with colorwork; I made intricately cabled fingerless mitts and knitted plain socks.

This past week, I got sick. Just a cold, but I spent most of yesterday in bed, and I woke up craving simple things. Chicken soup. Orange juice. Tweedy yarn. And not just any pattern. Garter stitch. Something that I could let fall to my lap when I got tired.

Some time in the past year, someone had gifted me Piper's Journey: a simple crescent shawl with a knitted on lace edging. It'd been in my queue for a while (even at the top of my queue for a while) but I didn't quite have the perfect yarn for it and somehow other things always seemed more important. But when the tweedy yarn craving hit, so did the Piper's Journey call. Tweed. Garter stitch.

perfection.

(I only had size 8 needles on hand. So it's a bit looser than the pattern usually looks:

 this image is from ravelry. pergola is the person to whom it belongs. please don't sue).