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O'ahu born and Rockville bred, both Maryland and Hawai'i are home. Middle-aged knitter (believe me, my 40 is NOT the new 20) seeking the courage to live consciously, each and every moment. Now if I could just remember where I put my keys...

Monday, October 25, 2010

Chptr 28 - in Which Chester Interviews for Witness Protection (aka Vogue Shawls and Wraps: Floral Lace Shawl)

So, one of my knitting goals is to knit through the Vogue Shawls & Wraps book. There isn't a page in there that doesn't set me into a pretty scary frenzy of "oh, I could..." and "This would be great with [insert name of super expensive luxury yarn that I only have a partial skein of here]" and "I could do that in about a week in time for [insert rapidly impending gifting occasion here]."

Why am I explaining to you? If you're reading this, you either know me and have seen this in action (in all its very attractive permutations) or knit/crochet like me and are fellows in fighting the SABLE creep (Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy) and the chaos we insert into our lives by thinking "I could do that in [insert completely illogical time frame for item completion here]. No problem!"

Ha!


Well, this is a true exception to this - looked through the book, thought "they knit it in cotton, why not in mohair?" (keep in mind there is often an obvious answer to this question...), and it actually WORKED! I had about 3 grams of yarn left over (was sweating to the last edging petal repeat, let me tell you), the yarn and colors and pattern all went together like magic if I do say so myself, AND - get ready for this - I FINISHED IT IN A WEEK! Even though I had to repeat the edging 1.5 times and still didn't really get it right (but luckily the mohair kinda hides this...)

Here are a couple more pictures of the shawl.

One of it on the knit (right side) of it hanging from a trellis (the obligatory Shawl-in-the-Great-Outdoors shot). 

And one of it on my sweet love who RELUCTANTLY consented (but consented) to pose with it - I put the wrong side showing here because I think the purl stitching with the mohair looks lovely.


I actually plan to do this shawl again in Colinette Mohair in Twilight  (I think it's #95).  For ME.

The biggest problem I had with this was doing the cast-off ruffles - I loved that there was no pick up and knit on crap to deal with  in the finishing, but even though I measured off my last row with stitch markers (TWICE, DAMMIT), I was one stitch off at the end, and my little points didn't totally match up with the stitch pattern in the rows and no way could this be submitted at Maryland Sheep and Wool, but it is a pretty pretty thing, and Meredith (who had a bad childhood experience with a mohair sweater) finds the shawl non-irritating next to her (gorgeous) skin.

OK, and I admit I wore it one day after I finished it to work over a tank and it was PERFECT office weight.  So I looked a little like a fluffy puff of something from a distance - I can deal with that.  And the only way I could let it go was to order the yarn to knit the next one (let's not talk about when this is supposed to happen... but I had to order that yarn... because someday I will be all caught up; yes, I will too [stamping foot adamantly]...)

OK, yarnies - I gotta go earn my luxury yarn money.  It occurs to me that my retirement will be knitting through my luxury yarn stash in a hovel of some sort.

XOXOXOX - jann

2 comments:

  1. I absolutely love your shawl... it's beautiful :) and I think Chester secretly likes his soft blanket and the photo shoots ^..^

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  2. Chester looks so cute, what a great name for a Golden. I love the shawl too!

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