This one wasn’t hard to name at all. I’ve been wanting to knit it for a while, the new Manos Del Uruguay light fingering came in, and I’ve been rereading the Kyle Murchison Booth stories. These colours and Catkin’s architectural construction really seemed to evoke the Parrington.

(If you don’t read the stories; Kyle Murchison Booth is an archivist at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum, and the stories are classic ghostly tales, very much in the vein of MR James. They are written by Sarah Monette and are deeply lovely.)

5/5/2013 - began swatching (in green) with my 3.75mm addis. Way too loose; trying with bamboo 3.25mms.

3.25mms much better. Finished swatch is ~4-1/4” wide, between 3-5/8” and 3-3/4” tall. (Closer to 4” between the columns of slipped stitches, which suggests I need to check my tension.)

Frogged the swatch, and knit to the end of row 29.

14/5/2013 - have knit to the end of row 64. (Have 221 stitches.) According to the pattern, this is the last pale stripe (if one is striping) before the lighter-coloured body. It is the eighth stripe.

According to the pattern pictures (at least of the red-gold and wine-coloured one; you can see it best on the third picture at the pattern page), there are eleven stripes.

I suspect this is perfectly manageable; I am just stressing a little because I have discovered that I am working with a pattern that doesn’t match the pictures I was smitten with and bought it for.

16/5/2013 - believe I have done the math! I was a bit worried about how many stitches I was going to add (so that I had an extra 20-stitch repeat in each section), and then I realized that I am a bit fuller than the original pattern accounted for, so yay.

In any case, on row 67, I am increasing by 32 stitches, 16 on each side. Knit the border normally, then increase by repeating {k7 (inc), k6 (inc), k7 (inc)} to the centre stitch. On the way back out from the centre, this’ll mean increasing by k7 (inc) first, and then repeating {k7 (inc), k6 (inc), k7 (inc)} to the border.

Will knit normally after that, to row 94, where I should have 313 stitches.

(ETA: got home late to find that Lucy chewed through the light yarn. After I’d knitted a full row, though, and she left a long enough tail that it’ll be easy to weave back in.)

18/5/2013 - There was a break in the ball of green yarn; it was split 60/40. I was using the smaller ball to start the shawl off, and I was aiming for eleven stripes. I’ve knit to the end of the fifth green row after the tenth stripe. Weighing and doing math, I have enough green yarn left for three rows, maybe four.

I will start the next stripe now (so rows 86-87, instead of 87-88), and worry about a few extra increases to make sure I still have 313 sts at the end of the green section.

6/9/2013 - Picked up after a slow while. Finished row 12 of chart one.

(somewhere in here, knit to row 22)

27/7/2017 - Picked up after nearly four years. Finished row 24 of chart one.