Friday, October 27, 2006

Fo - girl's best friend shawl

I'm glad I'm done with this shawl, I feel so accomplished, and this was my first time working with lace weight, my first triangular shawl, and my very own design.
There were a million and one times while I was knitting this that I wanted to throw it away, thinking it just wouldn't work.

Design: Girl's Best friend shawl
Yarn: Crystal Palace, Kid Merino, in painted iris, about 2 1/2 balls.
Needles: US size 4 (3.5mm) 40" circular needles.
Time: a little over a month, but I was working a lot of overtime, so I was sometimes only able to get two or three rows done a night. Although by the end I was so eager to wear it before it got too cold, that I stayed up late and worked on it double time.
Problems/Notes/Things I would change: I originally wanted this to have several more patterns kind of evolving, or going through a metamorphosis, from the sharp diamonds to soft leaves and finally to gossamer feathers, maybe with a light fringe, or a sideways knit edging. Yeah, that didn't work, I had a limited stitch library available, and I just could not find the right patterns that would match the way I was envisioning it, and also keep the dame drape and openness. So I decided to change the name and just go with the diamonds.

Then once I finished it my original plan was to do a sew bind of, because I've had a lot of success with making really loose and stretchy edges with it, but the prospect of sewing up so many stitches was quite daunting, so I wimped out and did a k2tog bind off listed in my knitter's handbook. I chose that one because the other bind offs it suggested for lace just wouldn’t work, I didn't want a crochet chain bind off, and didn't really want to put a sideways edging on it either, I just wanted it to be done. And since the suspended bind of makes absolutely no difference in my cast of edges I went with the k2tog. Unfortunately, I don't think I did it loose enough, while it was quite stretchy, I still had trouble blocking the shawl, and once I un pinned it, the bottom corner bounced in on itself, and keeps cupping up. I don't really mind how it looks, but I really would have liked to have made the edge scalloped as well, but it was just too darned tight and I couldn’t' make it look right. I'm contemplating going back and re-doing to bind off, but I'm not really sure what else I could do to make it looser.


And now after all that:


here it is straight on, my photography skills suck, and it was a bit breezy, but near the bottom you can see what I'm talking about with the bottom corner.
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Close up of the pattern
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And the shawl happily blowing in the wind.
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