Yellow silk shrug

I started yet another project last night- I seem to have startitis at the moment. It's going to be a shrug (Ravelry link) but so far I've only managed to get ribbing around the neck line done. It's going well but there's a little tiny problem. My gauge is twice that that is given for the pattern. That's not a problem in itself as it's an easy calculation to fit my gauge into the pattern. What I am worried about is that I might not have enough yarn to complete said project now. I only have three balls of this yarn in my stash and the yardage isn't great. I really don't want to have buy anymore- not only because matching the dye lot would be next to impossible now but also because the yarn is 50% silk.

Now I know that y'all know about my 'views' on silk (if you missed the previous rant on this subject then check out this post) so let me quickly explain myself. The yarn that I am using here is Lang Silk Dream (second link is a Ravelry one) which my mum bought for me last year for my birthday. It got included in the haul as I was on a bit of a yarn high at the time. My mum took me into a wonderful little LYS that I hadn't been to before called Spin A Yarn in Bovey Tracey, Devon and basically told me to keep piling yarn up on the counter until she said stop. They had so many brands that I hadn't seen before that I got a bit carried away looking at the colours and picking things up and petting them that I didn't really pay any attention to what was going on the heap as far as content was concerned. The Lang made it based purely on the colour. Yellow is my very favourite colour. I know it's one of those colours that really polarises people and I think that's because it's very easy for yellow to look horrible. It can be very difficult just to find a nice plain yellow yarn- it gets even more difficult once you start combining it with other colours. One of my friends summed this up succinctly the other day but I'm danged if I can remember how she put it so I'm just going to hope that you get what I mean. Anyway, my point is that the buttery yellow colour of this yarn is just beautiful- it's almost my perfect shade of yellow, hence I own some.
So after having 'sat' on it for the better part of a year I finally got around to doing something with it. It was choice #2 from my 'posh' stash that I was going through the other day. I picked the Hacho (Mirasol) over it but only because I couldn't think of anything to make with it. Well, it obviously played on my mind.
Oddly enough, I picked a shrug pattern out because it felt like the right thing to make with the yarn but it wasn't until this morning that I realised just what a good choice this had been. I think I've been processing this all subconsciously. Just recently I've been thinking about weddings- I have to go to one this summer and some friends of mine recently announced their engagement (so the inevitable planning of a knitted wedding gift has started). Specifically though I've been thinking about that I will wear to this years wedding. It occurred to me the other day that I don't need to buy a dress (woohoo) because my mum has made a fabulous one for me from some Alexander Henry* fabric which is, I think, called Yellow Bird Seed and looks a bit like this (the colours aren't exactly right I'm afraid):

I had forgotten about it as she still has to fit the straps to it and I haven't seen it since Christmas. Well, maybe I hadn't totally forgotten about it- weirdly enough I think that the shrug will be the perfect accompaniment to the dress. I'm going to see my parents at the weekend so I will take the yarn with me to see how well it matches the dress but if it does then that is both a strange and wonderful coincidence.

*BTW Alexander Henry fabrics are my absolute favourite- I have a secret hoard of fat quarters of different prints from the collection. I'm a complete sucker for it every time. Whenever I have a few pennies spare that I don't need for yarn I buy another little piece of fabric heaven. I have no idea what I will do with all of it as I'm not really much of a sewer but I do love it so. I have plans to one day go on a course and perfect my sewing skills to the point where I will dare to use some of it. For the moment though it has it's own special box all to itself :D