MKAL 2020

This year's MKAL shawl is called Entanglement. It's a mystery shawl so be prepared for anything. 

Choose your favorite fingering weight yarn in three colors, one skein each. I'd recommend choosing two colors that are somewhat close to each other and let the third one be a color pop with good contrast to the first two. Speckles, semisolids and solids will work well for this shawl.

Entanglement MKAL will kick off in August. The pattern is now available on Ravelry and yarn kits are coming to my web shop on Friday 10 a.m. (GMT+3, Helsinki time). If you buy a yarn kit you will get the pattern for free.⁠ The pattern comes in three languages: English, German and Finnish.
 

There are a total 13 clues which will be released every couple days, varying depending on how much knitting there is in each clue.⁠

Clue 1: August 7th⁠
Clue 2: August 10th⁠
Clue 3: August 12th⁠
Clue 4: August 14th⁠
Clue 5: August 15th⁠
Clue 6: August 16th⁠
Clue 7: August 18th⁠
Clue 8: August 20th⁠
Clue 9: August 23rd⁠
Clue 10: August 27th⁠
Clue 11: August 28th⁠
Clue 12: August 31st⁠
Clue 13: September 4th⁠

Will you be joining us this year? Any guesses on the shawl based on this year's logo?⁠

 

This year I teamed up with nurja for the yarns. I had so much fun coming up with three mood boards for them to dye three different kits of three colors each. You'll see the yarns on Friday but I can already tease you with the names of the three themes: Creamy Romance, Glow in the Dark and Summer Boogie. I'm excited to see which one you like most. If you've been following me for a while, it will be no surprise that Creamy Romance is the one I'm making my sample with.⁠

You can join the MKAL discussion threads on Ravelry and use the tags #entanglementmkal #wwokmkal on Instagram.

Yarn kits for Humminbird MKAL

August and my new shawl MKAL is approaching. I've just updated my web shop with yarn kits for the mystery.

Shop the yarn kits here

Humminbird on Ravelry

This year's yarn is handdyed Merino Singles by Martin's Lab. The yarn is fingering weight single-ply SW merino with 366 m/100 g.

I've curated three color themes with Martin's Lab. Each kit comes with three colors, one of which is a special colorway dyed especially for this mystery knit-a-long and not part of Martin's Lab's regular colorways.

The color themes are Candy Shop, Fall Foliage and Pinstripe. Candy Shop includes Fairy Dust (pink, teal and yellow speckles on an almost white grey), Mojito (mint) and Candy Shop (orange/brown and blue speckles on purple). The last one is the special colorway of this kit. If you're wondering about the best order for the colors, I made my first shawl with similar colors from my stash and used the speckled white for C1, mint for C2 and speckled purple for C3.

The second theme, Fall Foliage is all about warm autumn tones: Autumn in Poland (warm orange), Green apple (a fresh green, the special colorway of this kit) and Dry Leaves (warm brown). For this kit, I'd recommend the order as in the pic below: orange for C1, green for C2 and brown for C3. 

The third theme, Pinstripe, went for a graphic look. It includes Ash (dark grey), Anna (cold, greyish yellow, special colorway) and Silver Lining (light grey). I'm so taken by the fact that the special colorway got its name from me. I also knit my other sample shawl with this kit using the dark grey for C1, the yellow Anna for C2 and the lighter grey for C3.

There's a limited amount of each kit available on my web shop so hurry up and grab yours. Everyone purchasing a yarn kit will get the mystery shawl pattern for free. It will be sent as a Ravelry download link to your email (or your Ravelry library if you remember to tell your Ravelry nick in the info box). If you've already bought the pattern on Ravelry you can gift this to a friend by letting me know their email or Ravelry nick.

The kits will be shipped durin July and the MKAL starts on August 16th. Unfortunately there's no tracking for shipments outside Finland. If you want tracking, it can be arranged but it will bump up the shipment cost.

Could we start the MKAL already? Pretty please!

Mystery shawl for the fall

Are you ready for the next Anna Johanna mystery shawl knit-a-long? Last year, Shake it up was a hit and I've been waiting eagerly to host a new mkal.

Hummingbird is the Anna Johanna mystery shawl knit-a-long for fall 2019 so you’d best get ready to have fun and be prepared for anything!

Just like last year, the pattern comes with a whole bunch of little clues. Some of them will take one day, some will take several. As a statistician, I've had a lot of fun calculating the exact amount of stitches to be knitted with each clue to plan out the schedule.

The MKAL starts on August 16th and the clues will be updated as follows:

1st clue: August 16th
2nd clue: August 17th
3rd clue: August 18th
4th clue: August 20th
5th clue: August 21st
6th clue: August 22nd
7th clue: August 28th
8th clue: August 31st
9th clue: September 2nd
10th clue: September 5th
11th clue: September 9th
12th clue: September 13th

You’ll need three skeins of fingering weight yarn, C1, C2 and C3. I’d recommend vivid colors with good contrast. You'll want to clearly see the different sections of the shawl so I would not recommend picking a fade set for this one. When deciding on the order of the colors, if you have one pop color, I’d use that for C2. C1 should have a good contrast with C2.

On July 1st, I will update my webstore with yarn kits for the shawl (Don't worry about the shop being only in Finnish at the moment, there will be an English version too come July). If you buy a yarn kit, you’ll get the pattern for free. There will be three different color schemes for the kits. Each kit will include three skeins of Martin’s Lab Merino Singles with one special colorway dyed especially for this MKAL. The kits will be mailed during July so you'll have them ready when the mkal starts. In case you're coming to the Jyväskylä knit fest in July, you can select 'pick up' instead of 'mail' and we can arrange a meet up at the festival for you the get your yarn kit.

The shawl is big, using most of the yarn and the pattern includes guides on yardage after each clue to make sure you don’t run out.

Share your progress on social media using #wwokmkal and #hummingbirdmkal and feel free to use the logo as your cover picture. There's a general chat thread on Ravelry and once the MKAL starts, there will be a separate thread for each clue.

Who's going to join me?