How many stitches is too many? I’ll tell you. When you’ve knitted the centre of a hap shawl with a sensible number, and then you pick up for the border, and increase two stitches per side every alternate row (and it’s a big border) and then you decide that you’ll edge it with a ruffle, so you double your number of stitches by increasing into each stitch, and then double them again by yarn-overing before each stitch… That’s too many stitches. I have a grand total of 2,800 stitches per round, here. Thank goodness it’s not going to be a very deep ruffle.
Ravelry gave me a taste… and now I want more. There’s something immensely satisfying about sharing your work and ideas with a wider world, so this is the beginning of my knitting blog.
The deep breath is not only for the dive into the blogosphere but the fact that I’ve just bought about 4.5km of Shetland Supreme laceweight 1ply from Jamieson & Smith for all the lace-knitting I plan to do over the next year. This is partly due to being inspired by Sharon Miller’s Heirloom Knitting and Jane Sowerby’s Victorian Lace Today, but I’ve also just bought Knitted Lace of Estonia which has some absolutely stunning projects in it – completely different from the English and Scottish patterns in the other two books. Lots of ‘nupps’ (which in aran knitting would be called bobbles) that really add another dimension to the work.
I’m also using the queuing up of new projects as an excuse not to think about the lace shawl I’ve got on the needles at the moment, which isn’t turning out quite the way I’d wanted. It started as an excuse to use up some Patons Fairytale 2ply left over from a previous project, and an opportunity to practice hap shawl construction.
Field of flowers shawl
But having not done this before I didn’t insert a ‘break pattern’ row between the centre and the border. So it looks sort of funny to me where it goes straight into the border at top and bottom but has a noticeable ‘edge’ down the sides. Still, you knit and learn. The other grinch is that the supplementary yarn I bought – though supposedly the same – is clearly some microns thicker and to my eye it looks really obvious… However, the baby is unlikely to mind! And I can put lessons to good use with my lovely new Shetland yarn.
Knit Oxford 