20-07-2020

Final quantities: about 350 yards used on lace and 270 yards of ‘main colour’ sections.
The shawl isn’t really long enough to knot around my waist, though I can stretch the ends out enough to tie it after a fashion and for a while. When worn hanging loose around my neck, it has a tendency to slip off my right-hand shoulder, presumably because I’m lopsided; I suspect the crescent shape may work better with sloping shoulders than square ones. It does cascade into quite pretty folds down the front when loose, though.

There seem to be two schools of thought as to how it should be blocked; one group went for creating points extending outwards along the line of the ‘ribs’, and a second group went for stretching out points between the cones that terminate the ribs, which so far as I can tell is the way illustrated in the pattern, though the instructions themselves give no indications. I liked the shape of the cones better when they weren’t all stretched, so attempted the second option.

In practice the steam-blocking seemed to have very little effect on the acrylic; the garter stitch cast off still tends to roll upwards (as shown in the rear view photo) and the points disappeared within minutes of being worn. It might perhaps be worth having anothet go at pressing the edge vigorously through a wet cloth rather than just blowing steam at it….

17-07-2020

Complete. I had quite a lot of both the pink and green wool left over at the end (there would almost certainly have been enough pink to complete the edge, if I’d wanted to, but I need to tie it back to the rather random-looking green stripes at the edge of the garter stitch section, which give the impression I was just running out of wool at that point - which I was, of course….)

The border is much tighter than the rest of the shawl, and is going to be the limiting factor on how much it can be blocked. There’s very little stretch left in it, and in consequence the garter-stitch top tends to ‘hump’; at the moment it’s not so much a triangle as a pouch.

* * *

Blocked measurements: 76” long by 20” deep.

16-07-2020

Oops. I got halfway across the green row at the end before realising that the round repeats are nested inside the square repeats… and there are three separate square repeats in the course of the line, i.e. “[k2tog, yo] three times” at the start is not included in the main section!
It did seem all a bit random, but because of the colour change and the large number of new yarnovers it’s practically impossible to perceive a pattern at this point anyway; I’m hoping the one-row border lace will show up once the cast-off row has been worked over all the holes.

14-07-2020

Row 144. I may or may not have enough of the rose pink wool to finish Chart E; I don’t have all that much of the green left over, and the final cast-off row is a very long one of over 500 stitches which will probably use a lot of it….

Currently on about 340 stitches, spread over three 14-inch needles alternated with a shortish cable needle ( the 4th size 7 needle seems to be missing!). I’m now mainly working from the new written version of the pattern which has been issued since I started this project, combined with the old multi-part charts, which I’m afraid are rather easier to read than the shiny new all-inclusive charts. Though the written version would be easier to read if the repeats corresponded to the sections shown on the chart and visible on the fabric, rather than splitting partway through motifs (my guess is that they have been computer-generated).

08-07-2020

There turned out to be a knot in the middle of the pink wool, but I’ve done more than enough plaited lace joins at this point not to turn a hair at the prospect; easier to do an invisible join than unravel a very long way back to the start of the row.
I’m still having enormous trouble getting the stitch counts correct in the undefined sections at the start and end of rows, for some reason, despite switching to the ‘official’ increase method. I keep finding myself adding extra stitches, then removing them a couple of rows later, then finding that I’m short when it comes to adding the next definite feature, i.e. a purl column…
Row 113.

07-07-2020

The lace set-up row still wouldn’t fit the number of stitches, even after I’d fudged the earlier row to produce the right nominal stitch count at that pink. After endless amounts of counting and ripping back, I managed to isolate the problem to the start of the right ‘wing’, i.e. the first nine stitches on the chart… and eventually it dawned on me that the problem was that my increases were consuming a stitch, whereas the pattern assumed that I was picking up between stitches. I’d completely forgotten that I’d switched increase types ninety-odd rows earlier.
I could probably get away with continuing to knit two stitches into one and simply not counting the ‘blank’ stitch which follows in the chart, but there are a couple of places where an increase is immediately followed by a patterned stitch, so it’s safer to switch back.

However, when I reached the end of the row I found myself reminded of the reason I’d initially reverted to the ‘standard’ increase - the lifted increase closes up any eyelet hole following! So I’m now doing kbf in the fourth stitch from the end (and will have to remember to allow for the extra stitch consumed), and attempting a lifted increase everywhere else.

Row 102: lace pattern now established, and I finally ventured to cut the green wool.

06-07-2020

I was short by one row on the ochre wool. In any case, experiment shows that the difference in thickness between the ochre and the rose-coloured wool, the thickest and the thinnest of the three respectively, is sufficiently great to pucker the latter in stocking-stitch, so I decided to work the final rows as a broad stripe of 4 rows of green.

When I reached the first row of lace, two rows further on, I discovered that it didn’t fit because I had somehow acquired too many stitches on the needles! I ended up ripping back all the way to the last row of ochre at row 90, where I still had two extra stitches (I suspect I probably did an extra set of ‘centre’ increases at some point). Since I had already cut this wool short - mercifully I had made a conscious decision not to sever the green colour before I’d successfully worked a few rows of the rose-pink lace - I decided not to keep ripping back until I reached a correct count, but to fudge it at this point by executing just the visible yarn-over increases at the ends of the next stripe, thus increasing by only two sts instead of four on that row.

Presumably the error was introduced at some point in the last twenty rows, after my previous bout of frantic stitch-counting and calculation, but I’m afraid I really can’t face knitting the whole of that section yet again. I observe that the garter border rows are already very stretched and the triangle is showing a tendency to turn into a pouch, so I wonder just how flat this portion of the shawl is going to be! Currently on Row 92… for the third time.

05-07-2020

Reached row 88, unravelled back to row 68. At least yesterday’s algebra came in useful.
I doubt there will be enough ochre wool to finish. I’m going to introduce the green stripes from row 83, and if necessary I can finish off the A/B section with a wide green stripe instead of a single main-colour one.

04-07-2020

Discovered a dropped stitch and unravelled all the way back to row 57 - and then, after a great deal of algebra aimed at establishing exactly how far I’d unravelled and where the centre markers should be placed, jumped to the conclusion that I had placed the increase on the next row erroneously, tried to ‘correct’ the mistake, and ended up unravelling back to the same point and picking up all those stitches all over again for the fourth or fifth time…

The formula is: number of centre stitches = 5+2R
where R is number of repeats, or (rows DIV 8)+1
Number of wing stitches = rows + 4
Total number of stitches on a given row: =rowsx2 + 2R + 15

What I totally failed to do - given the involvement of modulus arithmetic - was devise a reliable equation to determine the row number and hence the number of centre stitches by simply counting the number of stitches on the needle. :-(
Fortunately, it is theoretically possible to establish the row number by counting the number of lace holes on the outside of the knitting - assuming you can remember your eight times table correctly, which weas where I was getting tied in knots! (7x8 is 56, not 52)

03-07-2020

Six and a half repeats of section A, and the shawl is beginning to get stiff on the needles; I hadn’t factored in the difference that doing a large number of stitches in DK wool as versus 3- or 4-ply would make. And if the finished item is really seven feet or so across, somehow I don’t think four or five needles are going to cut the mustard; I may have go out and pay for a very long cable needle after all! (Or… simply improvise by storing the end on a piece of string? Not quite sure how that would work in conjunction with with double-pointed needles…)
According to the pattern, the final stitch count goes up to 343, which doesn’t seem that much worse than the 258 stitches on the For Sir or Madam - but in double knitting I’m starting to suspect it may be a very different kettle of fish. However, I’m currently up to 138 sts, which still fits on one needle, and I have a third 13-inch needle ready and waiting, in addition to the cable needle (which really isn’t very much longer!)

The ochre wool is quite scratchy for something that’s going to be next to the face, but beggars can’t be choosers. It might improve with washing.

02-07-2020

Ripped back my 16 rows and re-knitted using my ‘normal’ increases. I now have visible lace on both ends. (Save that I ended up doing ‘kfb’ at the start of the row and ‘kbf’ for the end increase, which seemed to make the holes at the start a little bigger, since those ones were now tending to get closed up!)

My rewritten recipe in more familiar ‘vintage’ terms:

k3, m1, inc in 4th stitch and knit to marker, [slip marker], inc in stitch after marker, knit to second marker, inc in stitch before marker, [slip marker], knit until 4th stitch before end of row, inc, m1, k3

with rows 3-7 being the same except there are no increases inside the markers, only in the 4th stitch from each end. And right at the start those 4th stitches will be directly next to the initial marker positions with no intervening stitches to knit at all: effectively it goes ‘inc in 4th stitch, inc in stitch after marker’ and ‘inc in stitch before marker, inc in 4th stitch before end of row).

01-07-2020

After lots and lots of measuring and arithmetic, I have approximate yardages for my three colours of wool - which may or may not be accurate! Looking at completed projects in DK suggests that the shawl takes 7-800 yards (and some of those were missing out sections to save wool), which confirms my assumption that I don’t have enough of any one colour to do it in two colours, let alone one. Assembling three of my largest balls should probably do it.

The ochre is thickest, so I shall use that for the garter stitch, possibly eked out with the green if necessary. The pink is a little thinner than the other two, as well as beimg a larger ball, and will do for the ‘leaves’ (although green would be more appropriate!). The green will do for a bottom border if and when the pink runs out.

I shall also need lots of needles; fortunately I have an 18-inch cable needle and three (for some reason!) long size 7 straights, in addition to a set of long size 7 DPNs if essential, though I can’t see the latter being very practical.

Reached row 16 after at least three attempts; I think I now understand how the garter stitch section is supposed to work. The garter-stitch ‘tab’ is simply a strip of garter stitch 3 stitches wide that forms the bottom section of a three-stitch border. The shawl then proceeds by knitting onwards from both ends to continue the border and picking up along the side of the strip to form the basis for the ‘main body’ area.
Notes:

• ’m1’ represents a stitch added before the next stitch on the needles.
• As usual, the stitch that typically gets forgotten is the yarn-over at the end of the row!
• The specified increase method is only working for me at the start of the row. At the end of the row, it fills in the following yarn-over hole. I shall probably have to undo it yet again and try another method. (Standard ‘knit twice into this stitch’ should work, now that I understand where the extra stitches are supposed to fall; the trouble is that this ‘consumes’ a stitch, where the pattern assumes that you are adding one in between two existing stitches without otherwise affecting the count.)
• It looks as if there is an error in Row 1 of the Written Directions - obviously all the test knitters and inexperienced lace knitters were working from the chart! Unfortunately I find the charts an incredibly complex and bulky way of describing what is, once you understand it, a very simple 8-row repeat with only two different lines involved (plus ‘knit all stitches’ on the return rows). To be fair, however, the first few rows of the chart were invaluable in helping me work out why my stitch counts between the centre markers were perpetually wrong…