More birthday knitting revelations (and a happy birthday to Cairi for yesterday)!

Pattern: Peacock Feathers Shawl by Dorothy Siemens for Fiddlesticks Knitting
Yarn: Colourmart Cashmere/Silk 3/45NM Laceweight, about 80g in “Kingfisher”
Needles: 3mm Addi lace - whizzy!

I think I mentioned before that Mr B gave me this and another Fiddlestick pattern for Christmas a couple of years ago. As with a lot of people, I regularly see a pattern and think “Must. Have. Now.” so I’ve amassed far more patterns than I can ever reasonably knit - I probably have the pattern version of SABLE - but at least I know I have them safely tucked away, just in case…

When the yarn arrived from Colourmart, I knew that I had to use it for this pattern. And that I had to give it to a person who is more obsessed with teal than you’d think was humanly possible.

It was a very enjoyable knit. The entire pattern is charted with no written directions other than the pattern notes, so probably not for you if charts make you cower. Plus you have to mentally reverse the chart for the second half of the shawl as they’re mirror images, rather than symmetrical. However, as every row is different, the amount of paper needed to type out all 200+ rows in full would possibly mean the loss of several forests. Not to mention the scope for errors. And there wasn’t a single one!

I also learnt another new skill with this pattern - the crochet cast off loopy edging thingumy. It took a LONG time to do, because it was a new skill, after all, and I was using a 3mm crochet hook which seemed tiny. I like the way it looks now, but it was a real pain to block!

The yarn was divine to knit with. I was alternating between this and the Mystery Shawl which is knitted in Baruffa Cashwool and honestly, the Cashwool actually felt rough in comparison. That’s how soft this yarn is. Plus it just goes on forever, so I reckon I have enough left for another shawl in the same size.

Firstly, happy birthday to Diane! And seeing as it’s her birthday, I can finally reveal some secret knitting!

Pattern: Large Rectangle in Leaf and Trellis Pattern from Victorian Lace Today
Yarn: Garnstudio Alpaca, 6 and a tiny bit of a 7th x 50g balls, colour #6347
Needles: 4mm Inox circs for the slipperyness

Making this present has taught me that no matter how much I organise my knitting, giving myself months and months for a project to be done, it doesn’t change the fact that I am the most fickle person on the planet and the longer I leave a project, the less urge I have to pick it up again and finish it.

But I am very pleased with the final pattern I chose. The finished shawl is HUGE. It’s as tall as me and probably as wide. I knew Diane would like the yarn as she picked it herself from my stash, and there’s a similar pattern in her Ravelry queue, but even so, it’s still nerve-wracking giving a present to another knitter.

This is the first pattern I’ve completed from Victorian Lace Today and I suppose as it’s My Year Of Lace that if I didn’t knit a pattern from the book *this* year that I never would! The pattern was error-free, although the cast on directions were vague. It required a provisional cast on, but that really wasn’t obvious and it wasn’t til I was knitting the border that I realised it would be quite useful..! I picked up the stitches from the cast on edge instead which a bit trcky and something which I would have liked to avoid, but not too traumatic.

I also didn’t enjoy knitting the double and triple joins for the corners. To me, they looked messy and bulky; using a fingering weight yarn probably didn’t help with this. And sure enough, once the shawl was blocked, they flattened out nicely. And it’s another technique I’ve learnt, which is always a good thing.

As I blogged previously, I had the horrible experience of running out of yarn within a centimetre of finishing the shawl. I had reduced the number of repeats for the centre section in the first place because I didn’t want to run out of yarn and also because the shawl was pretty much big enough. In fact, it took almost as much yarn to knit the border as it did to knit the main section - roughly 2½ balls. Fortunately, the spare ball arrived really quickly from Scandinavian Knitting Design and though I didn’t expect it, it was even the same dyelot.

So why is this post titled “The Perfect Summer Shawl”? Well, yesterday was wet, cold and miserable and the shawl came in very useful indeed.

If you decide to block a large shawl in your bedroom in order to avoid it being trodden on by two small people, make sure that you leave yourself enough space to actually get out of the room without performing a strange, tippy-toe dance around the edges of the carpet to dodge all the pins.

Secret knitting #2 is done! I’ll finally have some finished projects to share. I’m planning a to finish off a couple of pairs of socks now, as well as planning a new project which has to take priority over Christmas knitting. A certain wizard is getting married and I am knitting a shawl to go with The Dress (which I’ve been given a sneaky peak of, and it is gorgeous; makes me want to get married all over again!).

This is the first time I’ve designed something for a particular person. I mean, I’ve knitted gifts, but this is designing from scratch. So that means my bedtime reading pile currently looks like this:

I already have a fair idea of what I want to do. The only request is that it is rectangular, and with the yarn on its way, I can start swatching very soon!

Eight rows left to knit. Yarn all gone. I knew I shouldn’t have whacked that spider.

This is a secret post, so no peeking Diane!

Has she gone?

Are you sure?

Then I’ll begin!

(more…)

No peeking, Cairi!

I mean it!

(more…)

I realise I’m overdue with my weekly Mystery Shawl progress post. Anyone would think that I had started clue 3, made a mistake, tinked, dropped a stitch, couldn’t find it, frogged the whole thing, restarted, made another mistake even earlier in the pattern, frogged again and then started from scratch for the third time and am now finally just over a third of the way through clue 3… *blushes*

There will be an update post hopefully on Friday. I think I’ll have to leave Clue 4 for a while, though, as there’s a certain other project to finish which has a definite deadline.