New blog, new project…

Sorry it’s still a bit of a mess here.  A bit like when you’ve been decorating and the walls are painted, but the furniture is still covered with dustsheets and you keep finding bits of old wallpaper stuck to your feet.  Or maybe that’s just when I’ve been decorating…

Anyway, it’s almost all sorted out.  I’ve got to set up a place on the site for the patterns yet. Well – just the one pattern right now, obviously, but it’s a start! – and apparently WordPress has some splendid features for creating different pages where I can list finished projects and other gubbins, but I have to play around with that yet.  But isn’t it shiny and new?!

*boring stuff*

According to the WordPress site, it would be as easy as buying yarn to move all my Blogger posts over to this new blog.  Except Blogger Beta doesn’t want to play along nicely, like original Blogger did.  I think I spent about two hours on and off trying out different things and searching for solutions.  I eventually found a program to get over the problem and it worked first time!  I’ve lost all my categories but that’s a small price to pay, compared to the idea of having to manually copy over every single post!

*end of boring stuff*

If you’ve got this far, then click on the link to read the actual knitting content of this post!

And so on to the knitting part of the post.  This so far nameless wrap/shawl/stole (all suggestions welcomed!) is for a future issue of Yarn Forward magazine.  The yarn is cobweb weight in a shade called Rosy (again a really hard colour to photograph, but the third photo down is the most accurate).

The pattern, after a few false starts, is a combination of a feather lace pattern and my own unvented border:

because it all fits nicely into a 24-row repeat and won’t be too scary for those with The Fear of Lace.  Also, with my designer hat on, I wanted a border that complemented the feather lace without involving lots of casting off. The border I knit on my Pi Shawl was cast off every sixteenth row or thereabouts and was probably part of the reason why it took me so long to finish!  The shaping on this border is done solely with yarn overs and knitting together and is altogether much nicer to knit.

This is also my first rectangular shawl, unless you count the North Sea shawl.  I liked my triangles and circle because I started with such a tiny number of stitches.  Casting on over a hundred stitches is a bit tedious, but then I won’t be increasing to five hundred or more, like with the Pi Shawl!