1 January 2020

I stopped this and it sat around for 3 or more years because I was pregnant with baby #2 and then started a business and I just completely stopped knitting. I have started again in the past few weeks (see wuthering heights shawl) and plan to tackle this again soon. However, we have had significant damage to woolens due to moths and carpet beetles and I am TERRIFIED that I will block the lace and it will just snap somewhere. I just don’t even know how I would fix it if it happened but I try not to think about it too much. I think there is still about 7 hours work to bind off the 2500 tiny stitches on this thing. We have a puppy and a toddler now so I have to do it in the rare times I am alone.

7 March 2016

Finally up to the last bit of stockinette border before casting off! I redesigned the piece so that it had two sets of leaves and a flower head rather than five sets of leaves because I like the look of the mesh border more than the frilly flower border. I am thinking maybe one more month until finished. About to increase to 1800 stitches around the border.

2 June 2015

Part-way through chart G and it has suddenly become more challenging from a patience point of view because there are about 900 stitches on the needle and I only have an opportunity to work on it late at night when my baby is in bed, but by then I’m pretty tired. I’m not the world’s fastest knitter so some nights I cannot get through a whole row before I need to put it down to go to sleep.

11 May

Oh no!!!

This is the first doily I have ever done, and I realised today that I had completely missed on the chart all the rows marked with X to indicate that I was supposed to slip a stitch to square up the chart. I hadn’t slipped any stitches so my rose is spiral instead of the lines being straight. I only just realised at row 103 because that row is prepended with LL and I looked it up. Given that this project is going to take me a year and I’m about 15% through the knitting at my current row, I am undecided about whether to start over or continue. If I continue will I continue to feel happy with the project or will I always feel sad inside?

1 May
I zoomed through chart E in less than a week, so I’m hoping to do the same with F. It is quite rhythmical and satisfying to do the more repetitive rows after all the careful chart following. I am aiming to have this completed at the end of 2015. Currently spending about 1.5 hours a night with the occasional baby nap-time session on weekends.

18 April 2015

I can now use my entire cable without magic loop - halfway through chart D

13 April 2015

I have been working on this a little bit most nights once my baby goes to sleep. I don’t appear to be a tremendously fast knitter but I am enjoying it. The main issue I am having so far is selecting needles that work with gossamer-weight yarn without snagging too much at the join. I started the project about seven times on different needles and eventually went with five wooden 2.0mm DPNS. I’m now on an Addi Lace gold tip needle, 2mm with 80cm cable and I have to magic loop it, but it’s the only cable needle that hasn’t snagged on me yet. In one case I tried filing the join with a nail file and it snagged so badly that I had to cut the needle tip off! That was a prym needle and it had these strange bumps in the cable just before the join.

Hopefully I can finish this within a year of when I started. I want to use it as a wedding veil!