Burn, baby, burn

I blocked the Phoenix shawl this weekend and it's fabulous, possibly one of my favorite things I've ever made. I love it with (appropriately) the fire of a thousand suns. But I'm going to talk about that at the end of the post so I don't get carried away and forget all the other stuff.

Since I finished Phoenix I was really excited to cast on for Fiori. I got this far:



And decided the yarn wasn't working for me. I hated it. I hated everything about it. I was surprised because I usually like Valley Yarns, and I've knitted with the worsted weight colrain and loved it. I finally decided that it was probably a perfectly good yarn that was simply failing to live up to my vision for this particular project. This is entirely my own fault for not stopping to think about the qualities of the yarn and what I wanted out of the shawl. While colrain worsted had a very wooly feel, colrain lace feels more like a cotton blend (it's wool/tencel, and since tencel, like cotton, is a plant fiber, I don't understand why this was such a revelation to me. Failure to actually think about it, I guess. Anyway, I was very disappointed and I started looking at other yarns. I was looking at some of the wool/cashmere/alpaca blends and even some of the 100% merino yarns, which I usually shy away from just because I like some silk or plant fiber in the blend for strength. I wanted something lofty and lightweight for this shawl.

I was lamenting my troubles on the 11 in 2011 Raverly group when I remembered this:



It's Sundara yarn silk lace in Tulip, a colorway that she put out a couple of years ago as part of her Flowers From My Mother's Garden series. When I saw it, I wanted it for Hanami. David got it for me for my birthday, but because of the way Sundara was doing orders for this colorway I didn't get it until much later. What I expected was a mixture of ivory, white, and pink, and that does seem to be what most people got, based on the images in Ravelry. But, when you order art yarn from a hand dyer you have to expect a little variation, and what I got was mostly ivory and yellow, with just enough pale pink tint to give it a bit of a pink blush when viewed from an angle.

I didn't mind but I decided it wasn't right for Hanami (besides, I had been given some pink Schaefer Trenna in the meantime that I used instead) so I just sort of put it aside. I didn't forget about it, exactly, but I never quite decided what to do with it. But, I think it will be perfect for Fiori. Not quite as lofty as what I had in mind, but silk is so lightweight, and the color is so perfect, that I think it will make a beautiful spring shawl. I cast on with it and knit through chart A, and all was in harmony in my little knitting universe once again.

However, I didn't get very far on it, because I was obsessed with my cashmere Limestone One Skein shawl. The yarn is so scrumptious, and the project goes so quickly, that I just couldn't put it down. I was actually hoping to finish it by the end of the weekend, but I didn't quite make it. I'm working on the knitted-on edging, and I only made it to about the halfway point. I added another pattern repeat in to the main body, since I hadn't yet used up quite half of my yarn, but I failed to actually look at the edging first. It's not a one-to-one repeat so I'm going to have to fudge a little bit as I go around the corner. The pattern has directions for short rows to knit as you go around the point of the triangle, and I'm just going to have to start the short rows a couple rows sooner than directed to make it work out. That'll teach me to check the math next time.

I'm kind of disappointed I didn't finish. I figure I basically have to finish a shawl a month to make it to 11 in 2011, and how encouraging would it be to have the first shawl done and have the rest of the month to start on the next one? Besides, my yarn for Galadriel's Mirror came in and I can't stand it, I want to start that one so badly. Sigh. Well, it's taking me about 10 minutes per edge repeat and I think I have about 17 repeats to go so...you do the math. I don't think I'll have time to finish it tomorrow but I'm hoping by Tuesday I will be able to finish.

Part of me is anxious and frustrated about the way I have really crammed up my knitting schedule for the next too months. I know it's only knitting, it's a hobby and it's not supposed to be frustrating, and I can really just take things at my own pace if I feel like it. I will eventually get to the point where I acknowledge this is what I'm going to have to do. But I WANT to do it all now!!!

Just to make things even more complicated, I signed up for Stephanie Japel's online shawl design class which begins on Feb. 1. I'm all kinds of wigged out about it, which is so ridiculous it's funny. If it turns out that I am utterly hopeless at shawl design, who is going to know or care?? I need to come up with a theme or concept, though, because I definitely will like the shawl better if I have an inspiration for it.

And now...if I could have a drumroll please....













Phoenix Rising in Lorna's Laces Helen's Lace in colorway Maple Grove. Knit to spec except that I didn't pay attention to the beading instructions for the center panel, so my beads all fall a row below where they are supposed to be. I don't think it really matters. Final product comes out to about 7 feet wide and three feet down the spine. This shawl pleases me to the bottom of my artistic soul. It looks more like a field of erupting volcanoes than a phoenix to me, but I love it. The yarn is perfect, the pattern is great, the beads are almost impossible to see in the pictures, but they look like tiny little embers. My only regret is that it didn't occur to me to add some into the triangles before the edging. I should have added more. This shawl looks like Pele herself would wear it and I LOVE IT WITH THE FIRE OF A THOUSAND SUNS.

Eat your heart out, Katniss Everdeen.

A Little Bird Told Me

Some time ago, I bought some Shaefer Trenna in Indigo from Little Knits without really any idea of what I was going to make with it.



Then I was browsing through Romi's designs the other day and found the Bluebird stole. Normally, I kind of avoid things that require me to repeat patterns over and over and over again, but the shawl is so perfect for the yarn that I decided I could suck it up. It's only the middle section that's repetitive.

This shawl held several surprises for me. The construction was somewhat different than I expected. I had seen that it started with a provisional cast-on and just kind of assumed this would be knit the same way Scheherazade was knit - cast on in the middle, knit to the end, and then pick up the provisional cast-on* and knit to the other end. Bluebird is done similarly, but instead of casting on in the middle, you cast on for one end, and then pick up the cast on, knit the entire middle section (which is like 36 repeats of four or six rows or something like that), and then knit the other end. Makes perfect sense. Totally flabbergasted me. It took me a while to work my head around to what I was doing (in fact, it only just now occured to me as I am putting this post together that my pictures are all technically upside down - the cast on edge should be at the top for the pattern to appear correctly). Fortunately conceptual understanding is not required, and I had only to follow directions, so no time was wasted with these discoveries.

The other slightly surprising thing for me is that the edging areas of this shawl are knit mostly on a reverse stockinette field. I found this a little confusing at first ("Wait...you mean I actually have to THINK on my wrong side rows?") but the effect is really quite beautiful, making the lines of the lace really pop.

Still, I completed chart A with some grumbling.



I should probably note that I nearly had a fatal error at cast-on which was narrowly avoided through the assitance of my back up stitch counter. I have the SO recount every cast on for me so I don't, say, randomly choose to ignore the existence of the ten numbers between 79 and 90.

Chart A complete, Chart B, which is to be repeated 4 times. I completed 2 before I had to quit for the night.



What happened to the Phoenix shawl, I hear you (all three of you) asking? The answer is that I did, in fact, work on my Phoenix shawl all day long on Saturday. I completed one 16-row chart.

ONE. ALL DAY. 16 ROWS.

Now, it is a fundamental fact of knitting that when you knit a triangular shawl that begins at the center back, you are essentially knitting along the longest possible line that you could knit. It's not so bad when you first get started, which is what makes, for me, the instructions "Repeat Main Body Chart 5 times" bearable. When you are first starting out there aren't that many stitches on the needles so that first three repeats are pretty much a walk in the park. Around repeat 4 it starts to get a little tougher, but you're past the halfway point and that keeps you going. Then you're like, sweet, I'm at the edging set-up, I only have to do the set-up and the edging and then the ending chart and I'm good! And in the back of your mind you kind of know that's a lot but you tell yourself that those charts are much shorter than the body charts anyway so you really think things are going awesome until you realize that the instructions say that you are to complete the edging chart 3 times (it's actually two times and then one more without doing the last couple of rows, but I'm rounding). And you think about how it took you ALL DAY to knit that one repeat of the edging set-up chart, which has the same number of rows as the edging chart, and you die a little inside, and you think about stopping to photograph your progress just to make yourself feel better, and you realize that there's no point because the shawl is so big at this point that it's scrunched up on the needles and it's just going to look like a pile of yarn anyway.

What's a knitter to do? For me, the answer is, start a new project. One that will fly by. One that will go really fast. One that DOESN'T GET BIGGER AS YOU KEEP KNITTING IT. One that's only 103 stitches wide and will only ever be 103 stitches wide, so that when you sit down to knit a soul-sucking 400+ stitches on your big project, you can take a break and zip out a few quick easy chart repeats that make you feel good inside before you go back to the never-ending toil of the Shawl That Would Not Die.

Please note that none of the ire that may be evidenced in the above paragraphs has anything to do with how much I like the shawl or how I feel about the pattern. The pattern is brilliant, the shawl is beautiful, and I like them both very much. All blame for this frustration must be laid at the feet of my most persistent lifelong foe, mathematics.

I do have some concerns that, as mentioned before, the number of repeats for the middle section of the Bluebird shawl might get to me eventually, but I'm hoping that the zippyness of the rows will enable me to get through that part. Besides, because of the way this is constructed, I can pretty much quit whenever it gets to be too much for me (but I won't, because I would like my shawl to be bigger than a post-it).

*I cannot seem to figure out the proper usage of "bind off" and "cast on." I tend to use the words seperately when using them as a verb - "to bind off" and "to cast on," and then hyphenate them when using them as a noun - "the bind-off" or "the cast-on." Also, I type yarnover as a single word when using it as a noun, and seperately when using it as a verb "to yarn over." I think we all need to agree on a standard - preferably, we need to all agree that my way is correct.