a fine kettle of stitches

I’m inordinately proud of this bit of lace — it was the only knit-along that I’ve actually kept up with! Birgit’s designs are always lovely, and the projects she designs for the Knitting-Delight yahoo group seem to generally be on the smallish side, scarves as opposed to very large stoles or shawls. I love this group and the way Birgit has set it up. It’s like making your way through a lace workbook. She starts each section with a basic technique complete with a very simple sample and a page to attach the sample or a photo to. Each new technique introduced in a project has it’s own instruction set. She began last fall with the very basics (I missed a couple before I signed up) and is working slowly up in difficulty. I’m not an absolute beginner in lace, but I’m close enough that I really appreciate her lessons, both in structure and presentation. If she decides to publish it as a workbook or lesson set, I will definitely recommend it.

I’m not terribly fond of the yarn, though. It’s Knit Picks’ Shadow in the (now discontinued) Campfire Heather colourway. I like the yarn itself fine, I’ve used it before and will definitely use it again, but the colours in this particular heather make my stomach wobbly. It’s got lots of bright orange, some reddish bits, and a dark green in it. The contrast of the orange/red and the green is just too much for my tender sensibilities Seriously, though, the first evening I worked on it I kept having to look away. I seem to have gotten accustomed to it, though and my mother loves it so I kept at it. I gave it to her as a belated Mother’s Day present (the final clue didn’t come out until the week after) and she’s already worn it twice. It actually came out quite a good size. I blocked the bejeebers out of it, and apparently I knit a lot looser than I thought.

pattern: Fancy Fullness by Birgit Freyer
yarn: KnitPick’s Shadow, Campfire Heather
needles: 3.25mm circular, Knitpick’s Harnomy
mods: Even though I crochet, I really didn’t want it on the edge of this shawl. I added an extra eyelet row to match the inner border and bound off with my new favorite bind-off for lace: k, k, k2togTBL, then k, k2tog TBL to the end.

If I had finished it as Birgit wrote it, I probably would have used only one skein of yarn, but since I wanted to add a row I did get into the second skein. I spit-spliced the joins so they’re pretty much invisible and no lumpy bits.

So, Mum finally has a knit shawl, I have a finished project I’m very happy with, and though she doesn’t know it yet, Kelly’s got some yarn. All 400+ yards of orange and green, which I never want to knit with again!