9/15/14 - Couldn’t begin on time, and when I came home I found a Fortuitous Stash Combination - I’d been digging for carbonel’s yarn and piled the other two on top, and they went together beautifully. So this will be a two-color shawl, and carbonel’s yarn will show itself off much better in an allover lace pattern.

I am using the Winter Lace doubled. Beads will be miyuki 6/0 matte transparent aqua a/b. All these notes would make so much more sense if I could just make up my mind quicker…and stick to it.

10/4/14 - Almost done with Clue 4. The vikkel braid looks very nice, but is a bit tricky; it’s kind of like trying to do Tunisian crochet with knitting needles. The doubled laceweight yarn is working up beautifully on size 4 needles, and I like the contrast with the lighter yarn.

10/6/14 - I chose to do the double vikkel braid, one in each of my colors. I cheated and actually did the second, contrasting one by using a crochet hook to chain across the row before I knit it. (I did figure out how to do it with knitting needles first, but this was was SO much faster and easier with two colors, and it also made it easier to keep the stitches that are on the needles in the color I want to use for the next section.)

10/10/14 - Had to frog and redo the braid as I gained 9 stitches on one side due to occasionally dropping only the first of the two knit stitches and then double-knitting into the second one, resulting in inadvertent increases. Really like how this is coming out.

10/29/14 - Got behind due to out of town trip; am now working final clue. Love how the vikkel braids came out in two colors. On the third row of the final (lace) section, I switched to size 5 needles.

Blocking will be interesting, as I usually block lace aggressively and cables conservatively.

11/16/14 - got the first two lace repeats done with beads and then forgot to bead the first row of the last repeat. Perhaps unwisely, I elected to continue knitting instead of ripping back, and added the beads by dropping a stitch, undoing two rows, adding the bead, and then redoing the two rows. Lots of drop-and-reknit practice, and it was very slow, but I’m finally done with that and back on track. Four rows and the bindoff to go.

11/23/14 - Finished, all but blocking and weaving ends. The unblocked version is considerably smaller than I expected; will see how it grows when fully blocked. I used a modified crochet bindoff in between points, adding one crochet chain stitch either side of the nupp and one in the middle between the nupp and first picot, then one crochet chain between each stitch bound off between points. I also used two stitches for the small picots and four for the long points. Unblocked, it is a little ruffly, which means the edge will probably stretch nicely in blocking. I hope.

11/25/14 - Blocking. I ended up blocking aggressively and it grew quite a bit. I like how the beads turned out. I like the whole thing enormously, actually. I think this will be one of my faves.