Scratching my original plan to use madelinetosh tosh merino light. The two skeins were too different in color, and with the sideways border, I was afraid it would look too weird.
Purchased Shibui Staccato, which should have nice drape from the silk, and no problems with any variegation. But it’s kind of heavy for a fingering-weight yarn, so I went up a needle size (to US6/4mm). Even though I did swatches with both US6 and US7/4.5mm, and was happy with the US6 after blocking, once I started knitting the actual shawl, it seemed really dense and stiff. I nearly ripped it out to restart it on the 7’s, but then decided to just take what I had already knit and give it a soak and pin it out. It relaxed a lot, and should be fine. I think it would be great on the US7 needles, but then I might not have enough yarn. But if I knit another shawl with this yarn, I’ll probably plan on using 7’s.
I have more yarn than specified for the pattern, but I’m also using a larger needle - so I want to be sure that I don’t run out near the end. I contacted the designer, Dee, who told me that for the pattern sample, the body took 56% of the total yardage and the border took 44%.
I ended up knitting one extra repeat of the body. I started to do one more repeat, but halfway through it looked like I was going to go over the 56% mark, so I ripped it back to just the one extra. I forgot to weigh it at that point, though, so I don’t know what my actual percents were.
I ended up with 16 grams of yarn left from the 4th ball.
The pattern is very well written, with lots of detail.
06-11-2014 And that’s When I Ran Out of Pins
(from my old blog):
Half a dozen eyelets from the end of the shawl. Well, I didn’t actually run out completely, just out of the pins in my pin storage box. I still had several unopened packets of T-pins. Thank goodness.
I was just going to use blocking wires, but then you wouldn’t see all the pretty eyelets at the border. I actually used wires first to shape the bottom, then pinned out the eyelets and removed the wires. I only had to remove the wires because I had threaded them through the eyelets, and I couldn’t pin out the eyelets properly. If I’d run them through the faggoting at the edge of the border instead, then I could have just pinned out the eyelets, but left the wires in place.
And speaking of the faggoting, I had to drop down the stitches of the inside faggoting section twice because I got my yarnovers in the wrong place. That was not fun. But the first time it was at the center of the shawl, so it was pretty noticeable, and I knew it would keep bugging me. Unfortunately, it was a LOT of rows down from where I was (at least 20). It took a long time to fix. The second time was closer to the end, and only about 8 or 10 rows down.
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