I wanted to knit Muir for a very long time, and for a few months I was searching for the right yarn to no avail. I was seeking a yarn without too much variegation, so that the color fluctuations in the fiber didn’t compete with the stunning pattern, and I had my heart set on dark green.

A friend of mine who knits, spins, and dyes kept asking why I didn’t dye the yarn myself. To me, that seemed like an awful lot of trouble, but in the spring of 2011 she agreed to teach some of her fellow St. Mary’s College knitters how to dye yarn, and I decided to use the opportunity to produce the green yarn I really wanted. I found a nice skein of undyed silk lace weight yarn online, brought it to the dyeing party, and kettle dyed it with two shades of green. The result wasn’t really the very dark green of my dreams, but it was closer than the yarns I’d encountered in my search and would clearly make a beautiful shawl.

I learned the hard way that when you kettle dye a 1100-yard skein of fine silk yarn, you really need to add extra ties around the hank to keep the yarn well-behaved, unless you want to spend four to six hours winding the skein into a ball. Live and learn.

By this point I had also decided that I wanted to make the beaded version of the shawl, and I found suitable beads at Michael’s. So here I was with the yarn and the beads, all ready to knit Muir, and I stayed that way for the better part of a year. You know how it goes; I had tons of projects that I was already knitting, and Muir is a long, detailed project, and I would get to it someday…

At the beginning of April, 2011, I suddenly had the thought that I would love to wear the Muir shawl at one of my grandmother’s 100th birthday parties in May. My grandmother is a novelist with many ties to the literary and Jewish communities of New York, so the second week of May was stuffed with glamorous Manhattan parties to honor the event. Muir seemed like the perfect accessory, and I had just finished my latest project. On the other hand, this left me with five weeks to make the shawl, which was a little crazy.

It will come as no shock to anyone who knows me that I finished the Muir and wore it to one of the 100th birthday parties (as shown in the last two photos). What can I say--I’m a little crazy. I also entered it in this fall’s St. Mary’s County Fair, where it won the blue ribbon for shawls.

It took me around four repeats to really get the pattern down so that I only needed to turn back to the chart intermittently to make sure I was in the right place. As I learned the pattern, I became more and more impressed with the brilliance of the lace design. The way that Romi Hill creates the flowing lines around the leaf sections and the way she uses different double decreases to generate the stems and leaf tips are quite clever, and watching it all come together as you knit is very satisfying.

One tip for anyone making the beaded version: if you follow the pattern’s directions for making the beaded picots, you will find it very awkward to place the bead, since you’ll be trying to manage the tiny crochet hook with the bead on it and the single stitch on the left needle, which is bound to come off while you’re manipulating everything. Instead, I placed the bead on the first stitch of the row before I started, and then inserted the left knitting needle into the stitch and below the bead to cast on the first stitch. The result is exactly the same as if you cast on and then place the bead, but without the extra fuss of doing it when your work is on two needles instead of one.