May Queen Mystery Shawl

A sweet knit from Tiziana, the May Queen started out as a mystery shawl from one of my favorite designers. The pattern is quite easy, so I thought I would experiment with my very own Firebird yarn and some colored bead sequences. Unfortunately, the #8 beads were really too small to show off my clever gradients and could hardly even be seen at normal viewing distance. But the beads were an adventure, and rather than writing about the perils of using ten different colors of teeny, tiny, round, bouncy, exuberant objects, I shameless quote kath1996's description (with her kind permission) of her own interaction with the little rascals. The experience closely mirror my own except that she used a single color, so you can multiply this scary scenario tenfold:

First you open the container with the beads, then you pick up the ten or so beads that always drop out of the container while you are trying to carefully open it…then you spill a small amount out into another dish or container so as not to have the whole container open in case the cats knock it over, then you hit the new dish of beads with your elbow and knock them all to the floor (where they roll under everything and cause you to grab a flashlight and crawl around with your nose almost dragging on the floor while you search every place for the blankity blank little suckers), then you get back on your feet, set the dish down with satisfaction, certain that you have every bead back in the dish, and tip over the original container scattering the beads everywhere. Now these beads can fly…so they make it into every room in your house (except for those ten over there that somehow managed to get through the window and are now outside). I would tell you not to worry about them, except that I can tell you for sure that you will be exactly ten beads short on the project…(and no matter how hard you look you will never find those beads again). At this point you could try the old tried-and-not-true method of vacuuming up the beads…but this only sounds good on paper…your vacuum will only further scatter the beads making it impossible to ever find them again. Ooooh, look over there, isn’t that the cat eating the beads? Yep…and she seems to be turning a bit blue….off to the vet.

 
Laptop is a little too finicky to eat beads, but that did not deter her from Getting In The Way from the beginning to the end of this shawl. I can't figure out the attraction--Firebird is odorless, the color is not red (which she finds attractive), and it doesn't resemble either a hamster or the ugly brown scarf thing she enjoys cuddling. I couldn't get her off my lap for the entire project, and, as you can see, once the project was completed, she claimed complete possession, beads and all.

Attempts to remove her were met with The Look:

And she followed up The Look with The Snooze:

A few hours later, I filled her food bowl--a guaranteed draw--and snapped a few Laptop-less photos:

Well, almost...