Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Swallowtail Lace Shawl

This knitting project has been in my queue for awhile. After I finished plying up my very first handspun, I thought there might be enough to knit that shawl.

Swallowtail Shawl Complete!

I cast on during the Winter Olympics. Ripped it out twice (only 10 rows in, no biggie). Spent bits of time since then knitting spiderweb-weight yarn on (relatively) bigger needles. Put in lifelines. Cut up plastic drinking straws to use for the amazingly large number of stitch markers (one between each pattern repeat). Spent my days muttering "k2tog, yo, k, yo, ssk, k". Then the section including the nupps ( Estonian for "you can really screw it up here if you are not obsessively careful".

The pattern called for 14 repeats of the first lace pattern chart, but I wanted a bigger shawl. There are instructions out there for a 19 repeat variation; I decided to do that one. Guidance was found here:
Swallowtail shawl begins

Swallowtail shawl progress

It always amazes me (in knitting, and in life in general), how the getting to the end of something is generally much more exciting then the actual end of something. (bicycling may be a bit different).

Swallowtail, completed, unblocked

It is done, and blocking.
Blocking

1 comment:

Janice in GA said...

Oh well done! That's lovely!