Sense of Accomplishment, Part II

"I consider lace to be one of the prettiest imitations ever made of the fantasy of nature; lace always evokes for me those incomparable designs which the branches and leaves of trees embroider across the sky, and I do not think that any invention of the human spirit could have a more graceful or precise origin."
- Coco Chanel, April 29, 1939

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A few months ago, I was talking to my sister on the phone. "I think I'll make this," I said to her, emailing her the link to Eunny's Print 'o the Wave pattern.


She opened the pattern. There was a surprised silence, then "Can you DO that?" she asked.




Yes, it turns out I can.

Print o' the Wave
Pattern: free download by Eunny Jang
Yarn: 1.5 skeins Island Hues (by Sweatermaker) 100% merino handpainted laceweight, 800 metres per 100 grams. Two different dyelots but they work together.
Yarn Source: Fun Knits, Quadra Island. Thanks again, Shelley.
Yarn Cost: $35 for both skeins, of which I used less than 1.5. So about $25.
Needle: 3.5mm Clover Takumi bamboo circular, and 3.5mm Addi Turbo Lace
Cast On: August 12, 2007
Bound off: December 14, 2007
Finished Dimensions: 97" long, 27" wide after an aggressive blocking.
Notes:

• The centre panel of this stole just FLEW BY. I think I got it done in just a couple of weeks. But the edging felt so very, very slow. I had trouble memorizing the edging pattern - my brain wanted the repeat to start and end on what was actually row 9, so I kept over-increasing and had to rip back a repeat about 10 times in total. However, I took a break from the shawl when I was waiting for more yarn, and when I came back to it I had no trouble with the edging. It was just a mental block.
  
  
• The fact that I ran out of yarn was so frustrating. If you're thinking of knitting this stole, you should be aware that the pattern calls for 800 yards of laceweight yarn, and I ended up using about 1200 or 1300 - not sure yet exactly what the amount. I had bought the skein of Island Hues thinking it would work because it contained 880 yards. When I had to buy more yarn it was a serious problem - it was handpainted and couldn't be matched. I think the problem is that Eunny created her original version in cobweb weight, so the yardage she specifies for the laceweight was just an estimate on her part. Just keep it in mind if you're queueing this project.
  
  
• I knit the centre panel differently than Eunny suggests in the pattern. She directs you to knit both sides from a provisional cast-on, then graft the ends (what would be the cast-off) together to form the centre back. Instead, I knit the first half from the provisional cast-on, then started from the same cast-on edge to knit the second half. The knitting flows in a different direction to Eunny's, therefore. She was trying to achieve the look of waves flowing down each arm...my waves run UP, unless your eye perceives the openwork as the waves, in which case they run down. It's all in how you look at it, and since this is my first lace project and I think it's pretty, I'm not going to torture myself about it.
  
  
• I blocked this shawl very, very aggressively. I soaked it in wool wash for over 30 minutes, then pinned it out until it was so taut it was barely touching the towel underneath. I wasn't consciously trying to maximize the length, but the shawl seemed to want to go long, so I let it Go Long. I did have to re-wet it with a spray bottle numerous times during the blocking process as it had already dried.
  
  
• The Island Hues yarn is beautiful. It's light, soft, and divinely coloured. I did have a few felting moments while knitting the edging on, when the stitches I was working toward got a bit fuzzy and tight. It wasn't a problem, though, and when looking at the finished piece you can't tell at all. The yarn, once blocked, developed a slight patina that I love...hard to see in the pictures but in the flashed shots you can catch a glimpse of it.
  
  
• There are some errors in the edging chart - not a major problem since they are well-documented, but again, if you're planning to knit it, just check first.

I had no model, and had to make do with the timer on my camera, but at least you can see the width here. Shoulders to hips with ease.


There has not been an abundance of natural light here in mid-December in the temperate rainforest, but I don't like the flash: it makes everything appear so prosaic. So, as usual, I took some unflashed pictures: I much prefer them. They may not represent the colour as well, but they capture the lightness and drape, the tactile pleasure of the piece, so much better.



I loved doing this project. I'm so looking forward to doing another lace piece. The knitting is much easier than it appears - the satisfaction of building row after row of a chart, watching the space and direction emerge under your needles.....so satisfying. And it looks all well and good, until you soak and block it - then it becomes breathtaking.

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Thank you for your comments on my Dad's Aran, by the way - it was a pleasure to knit and I'm glad you all like it. I'm partial, myself. Just two days ago I was at my parents' house and he remarked that it was time he had another sweater.....hee hee!

The Utilitarian Knitter

Wow. A whole week went by - how about that?

Look what I got today:




a lovely package from Jo, with the yarn I won on her birthday contest (thanks Jo!). This package was such a treat to receive - along with the yarn she included a pound of Dunkin' Donuts coffee (hilarious), a bag of quite intriguing veggie chips, a package of something called "TastyKakes", four ornament creme eggs (think Easter creme but slightly smaller, with a different wrapper), and several lovely post cards from the Eastern Seaboard. SO NICE. Note the hand stealing into the frame to investigate the ornament egg...Charlotte is monstrously addicted to chocolate and can smell it at fifty paces. I think the yarn will become a hat and wristers for me...I may even cast on tomorrow as this will go FAAAAST and will be a nice break from the Aran. (I'm in sleeveland, by the way.)

And, I received some more yarn for the Print o' the Wave stole, from my Fibre Sistah Shelley. (By the way Shelley I will TOTALLY phone you tomorrow with my Visa number...SO SORRY.) She came through in the crisis and got me a very very close match to the original. Sadly it's not close enough for me to continue knitting the edging from where I am - I had to rip the entire edge off. We're talking about forty repeats, people. Luckily I remembered in the very nick of time that I should take a picture for the blog, so I snapped a couple quick while I still had four inches left. Sometimes I'm not a very good blogger that way - I tend to forget there's an interest in my works in progress, and don't bother to document them.




Anyhow, I somehow didn't take a picture of the new yarn (see above re: not a very good blogger) but I did manage to wind the better part of it into a ball during knit night tonight, by hand. I'll show it to you next time, when I've finished the ball and started knitting the edging on. The new colour contains most of the old colours, plus a few dashes of quite a dark bronzey brown colour. It should be nice....although of course HAVING THE WHOLE STOLE KNIT IN THE SAME DYE LOT WOULD BE BETTER.




One good thing about this situation is that I will be able to weigh the skein before knitting the edging, then weigh it after knitting the edging, thereby deducing the exact amount needed for making this stupid pattern. My incredible bad luck will in the end be turned to the common good, rendering my frustration, annoyance, and expense totally worth it.



Right.

Random Fact Generator

1. I have made two more heart purses. They come together fast once you've made one or two. These were to be Christmas presents though my daughters have already laid claim to them...so I guess I'll be knitting a few more.



2. Charlotte tried to look up the word maraud in her Webster's New World Children's "Dictionary" (those are sarcastic quote marks) and it wasn't there. I was disappointed and annoyed as I feel marauder is a perfectly reasonable word for children to know. It's not as if I was asking her to look up "pederasty".
   


3. The key to the cipher was "exchequer". I am kind of downcast that nobody solved it in the comments, and enthusiastically volunteered to join my team (my team of one) on the Quest for the Ice Fox.


4. Yesterday I made scones and tea for two entire meals. They were very nice both times: I had them with lemon curd.


5. I ran out of yarn on my Print o' the Wave stole. The retailer is working on it but it looks like I'll have to rip the entire edging off and start it again with a slightly different colour.
   


6. My youngest daughter has been calling "Stuart Little" "Robowt Noodles" for two days and it just never gets old.


7. We are making a plaster-of-Paris volcano for school. We will make little PlayDoh houses and people, then erupt the volcano and watch what happens to the village and crops. (So I guess next week we'll be looking up "post-traumatic stress disorder".)



8. It is only 60 days until Christmas.


9. Tonight is knitting, and I can hardly wait.


10. My cross-the-street neighbour has put up a Hallowe'en decoration on her door, and it is the subject of endless fascination on the part of my children.

To Thee, Alone, Will I Be Faithful.

Project monogamy is a wonderful thing. I have finished the centre panel of Print o' the Wave, picked up all 640 stitches around the edge, and knit the first row. I've only been knitting this thing for 10 days. It's coming together super fast - I think the final total will be around two weeks.

Yesterday I went to Fun Knits with Karen to pick up my first ever Addi Turbo. It's one of their new lace needles - 3.5mm in diameter and 120 centimeters long. This is one big needle. I have to say, I am completely wild about it. The cable is so smooth and just the right amount of flexible, without being too floppy. The join is everything it should be (although I can see a little gap in there, which could prove problematic if you were knitting with a very fine or splitty yarn) and the tips.....oh, the tips. They are fairly sharp (not as sharp as my Boye 14" straights, which easily draw blood) and despite the smoothness of the needle, are somehow grippy. I am not sure what dread hand or eye framed that fearful symmetry, but it was genius...this needle is ideally suited to its task. It was well worth my $25.

So I am now quite sympathetic with all those people who blog about the futility of photographing lace in progress: get a load of this very educational picture of the Print o' the Wave stole centre panel, on the new Addi Lace needle with 640 stitches picked up around the edge, corner markers in place. (Thanks for the markers, Natalie!)

Clear as mud.

Although it's only the end of August, fall seems to be here already. I read this beautiful paragraph from one of my favourite bloggers yesterday, and it made me shiver.

The summer is gone and the wool-sweater months are here once again. For the last few nights the temperature has dipped below zero for a short while. In the mornings the fog has been lying on the lake. Most of the leaves are still green but here and there are few early-birds where you can spot colours changing and a few have fallen off. The moment of standing outside in the very early hour today by the lake drinking the first cup of coffee and breathing the foggy morning air felt very good. When I stepped into the warm kitchen the contrast between the warm inside and cold outside was clear and I loved the feeling of rubbing cold hands against eachother to warm them up a bit. It is definately a wool season again.

I admit I actually cried a little bit when I read it. I don't know what it is about Lene, but I think I get teary-eyed more often reading her blog than any other. Partly I think I romanticize life above the Arctic Circle...and who wouldn't, the way she presents it. She has a quiet, introspective style that seems perfectly suited to her life there in northern Finland, with her lake and her caribou and her smiley dog. Partly, too, there is a truth about her words because, though she blogs in English, it isn't her mother tongue. Somehow her emotions emerge more clearly because of this...there isn't a lot of verbal clutter in her sentences. (Unlike, say, mine.)

Anyway, I think wool weather is almost here on the west coast of Canada, too. The nights have been cold lately...nothing like Lene's lakeside home, where it has gone below zero already, but I've needed St Brigid a couple of times this month. The garden is still thriving, though I can tell things are slowing down quite a bit.

The rose bush, complete with elegant garden spider taking her chances in her new web. It's almost egg-laying time for these ladies - they are all over the place outside. The rose bush is the one thing that will bloom until November if properly trimmed of dead flowers...last year it was quite beautiful. These particular roses smell lovely, too - after three years I am finally reaping the rewards of putting every banana peel we generate, around it.

Every June I agonize over spending Mr HalfSoledBoots' hard-earned cash on annuals, and every August I wish I had spent more.

The bamboo has come back, at last, after almost being wiped out by a February cold snap way back in aught-five.

Tonight Charlotte goes for her first ever friend's-house-sleepover. I have a feeling the phone will ring sometime between 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM and selfishly, I rather hope it does.

Work Continues Apace.

I spent the better part of last week working on Charlotte's sixth birthday party, which we had at the park but which ended up being rained out. I took this just before we all piled in and God closed the door.

Party stuff took a lot of time but I still managed to spend a bit on Print o' the Wave.

I could use a little affirmation from you guys on this one. Here's my problem: the pattern calls for provisional cast-ons for each half of the stole, which are then grafted at centre back so that the pattern is in a mirror image, with the waves going in the same direction down each side of the body.

I don't know if she calls for this method because it's traditional, or because it's unnecessarily complicated. Eunny is a wonderful knitter but sometimes I wonder if she secretly flogs herself with a bundle of circular needles as a way to make the knitting experience even more tortuous.

I had a few options for dealing with this problem, because I don't care for the three-row band of stockinette at centre back when you follow the directions as given. I considered:

1) knitting the whole back as one piece, without bothering to reverse the flow of the wave pattern so that it appears as a mirror image. I actually think it would look just fine this way.

2) do the provisional cast-on using a circular needle instead of waste yarn, then knit one half of the centre panel. Break the yarn and join in again at the provisional cast-on, beginning the second half of the centre panel on the first row and knitting off the circular needle. This would create the same mirror-image effect as her directions, but without the centre stockinette row and all the plaguey kitchener stitch.

3) suck it up and do it her way.

I chose option 2.



Here is the centre of the shawl, with a perle cotton lifeline in place. I think this looks okay -- not perfect but it'll do. How good or bad it looks actually depends on whether your eye goes to the pattern of holes (the openwork) or the waves (the increases/decreases). I question whether non-knitters will even notice it...and if they do they will most likely think it deliberate. What do you think? The lifeline is still in place so I can easily rip back to this point and change it, if it needs changing.

At this rate I will be making a trip to Fun Knits this week to pick up an Addi Lace needle to work the edge. I need one that's about 120 cm long, which is hard to find, and since this is the first of what will be many lace projects, I don't mind investing the $20 for a really good needle.

And, talking of Eunny, this fall I am planning to tackle a knock-off of this beauty, using my trusty copy of Cables Untangled. I have high hopes for this one, but I just have to find the perfect yarn. I had my eye on an Elsebeth Lavold that Webs has on clearance, but I think it might be too heavy...it knits up to 18/10 cm. I think I'll have to go with a worsted, or light-worsted, though I was hoping for a quick project. But then, St Brigid only took me seven weeks, right?

Spiral Scarves...And The Countdown Begins.

Attention Sandra: do not read this post.

This year we're doing something different for Christmas presents. With the kids in the family getting a little older and more aware of Who Got What and She Got To Unwrap More Than I Did, it's becoming more and more important to rein them in. To be fair to them, it's not only the children that need reining in...come 10.30 AM on Christmas Day I am always looking hopefully under the tree to see if there's anything I've missed.

My sister-in-law and I decided to do it this year: "handmade" gifts. This doesn't necessarily mean "knitted", although, realistically, knitting will figure prominently.

I had bought some bouclé yarn last year, with vague thoughts of knitting ponchos for all my nieces...after half of one poncho, when I was crying bitter tears of boredom, I abandoned the project. The yarn will now become spiral scarves for the girls, with matching wristers.

This one is in camo (hard to see in the picture), for a very non-girly 8-year-old.

The thing with knitting for children is, there's always the very real possibility that they'll despise what you have made for them, send a faint sneer your way on Christmas morning, and promptly consign it to the Goodwill bag. Good news is, with acrylic bouclé yarn that I got on a BOGO sale and spent one day knitting, it won't break my heart. And, with the perversity common in non-knitters in general, and children in particular, they are more likely to be enthusiastic about acrylic bouclé than about, say, cashmere laceweight.

The pale blue. For a slightly girlier niece....haven't decided which, yet.

Speaking of laceweight, here is the first work-in-progress picture of my mother-in-law's gift: Eunny's Print o' The Wave Stole. I'm knitting it in Sweatermaker's Island Hues (no website but you can find out more about it at Fun Knits), on bamboo needles which I have sharpened almost to the danger point with an emery board. It's the first time I've knitted proper, laceweight lace, though the patterning, chart reading, and so on is no different to, say, the Pomatomus socks, or any of the other lace socks I've made. This means I've avoided the much-mythologised beginning-lace-knitter learning curve.

This shows the patterning well, though the colour is truer in the second picture.

I started the gift knitting in January - a pair of Anemoi Mittens for my sister, who had recently assured me that she loves wearing mittens and has quite a few pair of them. A few days ago, she spotted the Anemoi Mittens on Eunny's sidebar, and commented "Boy I'd like those...that is, IF I wore mittens."

I said cautiously, "But...last year you told me you wear mittens all the time."

She breezily said, "Oh, no: I meant gloves, not mittens."

There was a silence.

Then she said, "Oh, no."

So I suppose the lovely blue and white Anemoi Mittens are destined for someone else. Sadly, Gwen has the smallest hands of anyone I know, so unless they go to a niece, they will have to be ripped right back and reknit with a size larger needle. I'd send them to a niece, but....well, the rest of them are getting acrylic bouclé spiral scarves. It hardly seems fair.