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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

A Bit of Lace

There's only a little more than three weeks left in my LYS' summer contest, so most of my evening leisure time has been spent at one wheel or another trying to get as much spun up as I can. Last week, however, I took some time off to do a little knitting. I've been working on small projects as usual during my lunch breaks at work, but it's been some time since I worked on a big-ish project at home (yes, my Essential Cardigan is still hibernating!). I wasn't necessarily looking for a project to do; rather, one kind of came to me.

Having used the Free Pattern Testers group to test my mitten pattern, I've peeked in from time to time to see the other patterns in testing. About a week and a half ago, I happened to catch a test for a small shawl before it filled up (I've found that the lace patterns test to fill pretty quickly). The pattern was written for one skein of sock yarn, so I knew it wouldn't be a huge time commitment and promptly signed up. I cast on for it on a Friday night (the week before last) with a skein of Dream in Color Smooshy in Happy Forest that was wound and waiting in my stash. Before I knew it, I had a shawl:


Obviously I did a poor job of photographing it because I cut off the right edge, but I really like how this turned out. The slightly crescent shape is achieved though six increases on every two rows (four on the right side, two on the wrong side) through the stockinette section. Then, when you get to the lace, you increase with yarnovers just twice on each right side row. I think what's notable about this shawl is that all the increases before the lace border are m1s, so there are no holes along the top edge or along the center spine.


The lace itself was pretty straightforward, though I made a couple of errors (just some extra yarnovers) that had me scratching my head a couple of times. Fortunately, all were easy to fix and no frogging was needed.

It may sound silly, but I think what I liked best about this shawl was how easy it was to block! I put two pins in the center point and two at each of the end points (more for stability than anything else) and then one in each point along the border. I didn't have to get out my blocking wires, and even though I did repin the points a couple of times -- it's not in my obsessive, perfectionist nature to not repin! -- the entire process took less than 10 minutes.

The pattern is not yet available, but I can fully recommend it, so keep an eye out for it!

2 comments:

  1. Lovely shawl and yummy colour!

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  2. You know I'm not a lace person, but this shawl looks great! Very cool pattern ...

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