This is a secret post, so no peeking Diane!

Has she gone?

Are you sure?

Then I’ll begin!

I’ve posted a few times about Diane’s birthday present. It’s been a tricky knit, because I’ve changed the pattern and the yarn and started it early in the year with plenty of time to spare and yet I’m still knitting the final few inches with only a week or so to spare.

The photo isn’t particularly clear, just in case my Flickr account is being stalked (!), but I am now on the third - and most definitely final - incarnation of The Birthday Shawl.

The pattern is the jauntily titled Large Rectangle in Leaf and Trellis Pattern (Ravelry link) from Victorian Lace Today. I’m using the Drops Alpaca I started using for the Cobeweb Lace Stole (which didn’t get much further than the photo I took a couple of months ago, before I decided that it looked like a pile of knitted crap and frogged it).

It’s my first experience of working a knitted-on border on a rectangular shawl. The two rectangle stoles I designed have the border knitted as the shawl progresses because I didn’t want to get to the end and then have to do more knitting. I’ve worked a knitted on border for the Pi Shawl, which wasn’t hard at all. But this pattern involved the mysterious double and triple joins. Again, not hard once I got my head around it: it just means attaching the border to the same point on the shawl two or three times over. This creates fullness at the corner points to help the pattern fit around the corners.

I’m almost at the end now and am currently in a state of panic that I’ll run out of yarn. It’s going to be a close thing, so if you hear a scream of frustration, it’ll probably be me.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 4:34 pm and is filed under My Year Of Lace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.