Stunner

I can't believe it.

I just...


I mean....

It's almost too much to comprehend.

I finished Vlad.    First off, whoa holy cow, whodathunk?  I knit lace!  Someone throw me a parade right there, ok?


Seventy Six Trombones led the big parade....


When I was binding off my stitches, it sort of looked a little....blah.

Vaguely reminiscent of what a human pancreas might look like, actually.



Erin, why is your pancreas laying on the ground? 



Or if a jellyfish were to go skydiving.

Annnnnnnnnnd........splat.



Aw, bummer.  The chute failed.

But then the miraculous process of blocking happened.  I love this part.

The straight pins were administered, the white fluffy towels did their best, my queen sized bed had a cameo and the Ella Rae Lace Merino really got to shine.



Can I tell you how much I love the scalloped edges? 



I employed a good idea during blocking with my straight pins.  Always count them out as you're using them, so you know how many you need to pick up afterwards, and you (or your husband) do not roll onto one in the night, since you're (read: me) blocking on the bed.  I quickly got a second good idea when I was picking pins up:  learn how to count properly.  46 pins down does not equal the actual 43 pins I picked up.  Blocking while talking to your children is not a good idea.  So far no one has found any stray pins, though, so I think we're in the clear.

So...I knit lace!  Yay for me!!!  Another part of the world of knitting has opened up to me.  I no longer have to look at lace shawls with wistful sadness because I think I can't knit lace.  I have done it!  Swallowtail Shawl, you better watch out!  I will conquer you one day very soon.  Now that I know about lifelines and how helpful they are, I can't recommend them strongly enough. 

More pictures!!

Whew, ok ok ok, I'll simmer down now.  What's next on the knitting horizon?  Well, Ravelry has a name for the games:  The Ravellenic Games.  Good for them!  Are you going to participate?  If so, what will you be knitting? 

I've already cast on two more projects, and pictures of them will be forthcoming for next week.  I think I'm going to figure out what my Ravelympic Ravellenic Project is going to be.  See you next week!

I has a sad.

It's official.  I have a condition.  A heartbreaking, possibly progressive illness.


 I have (Acquired?) Lace Developmental Disordered Syndrome...uh....Condition. 

ALDDSC.  Totally.  I'm not sure if it's progressive or not.  But I am very bummed about the current prognosis. 



Yes, I am using kittens to talk about my feelings. 

 See, I figured that, if I caught my mess up (remember last week?) and took drastic steps to correct the problem, then that would be that.  Problem solved.

Au contraire, mon frère. 

I knit carefully.  I used lifelines.  I read the chart.  I even counted out loud to myself.  Yet somehow I contracted this condition (bacterially?) where I am unable to make lace.  Observe:

Here is last week's Vlad.  I had already had a terminal issue with the first attempt, had frogged, and started it over.  Here we have a correctly knitted set up chart and the first two body repeats done.  Correctly.  The first attempt had the correct number of pattern repeats on one half of the shawl, and was lousy with extra stitches on the other half. 



Now see the picture from this morning:

Houston, we have a problem.  The first symptom I can see is that I have three hands here.  GAH!  Oh, wait, hang on.  Forgot I enlisted my husband to help spread the lace out.  Whew....  Ok ok, I don't know why the picture flipped sideways on me, since I did not snap it sideways, nor upload it sideways,  but what we have here is a total mess.  I have not enough pattern repeats on one side, and way more than too many on the other side.  What the $&%@!!!  If I can read a knitting chart (I can), and if I was reading the pattern in the language I am most fluent in (I was) and if I used lifelines (I did) and if I was even counting out loud to myself while knitting the smarmy bugger (yup), then shouldn't I be granted immunity from this kind of crap????

Therefore, without a doubt, I am afflicted with the aforementioned Condition.

Is there a way to treat this condition?  Will I be Lace Intolerant all the rest of my knitting life?!? 

Mooooaaaaan.

                                             

Ok.  Deep breath.  I will summon the urge to rip back the offending muck up to the last "save point"/lifeline and try again.

Oh yes, I will survive.

When I got thoroughly annoyed  set down my lace (shut it) shawl, I picked back up another project and made real, appreciable progress with it.  When one project slaps me upside my head, I find it comforting that at least I can still master a simpler knit.  I have here both the front and back of the Krista Tee. 

All that I need to do with it is knit up the little sleeves, sew it up, and voila.  Of course, that is if the Knitting Goddess/Ruler of the Yarny Universe doesn't have other plans for me.

Excuse me while I go throw salt over my left shoulder, cross my fingers, toes, and eyes, and spin three times counterclockwise while a rooster crows.  Facing northeast.  Whilst holding a skein of worsted weight in a color pleasing to the Goddess.

I need to go lie down. 



How (not) to knit a lace shawl

I am a glutton for punishment, folks.  How many times have you heard me say write that I just can't knit lace?  How many times have I bewailed the fact that I've been bested by the Swallowtail Shawl that everyone and their three-legged blind dog can knit?  But I cannot resist admiring lace for its precision, the way it reminds me of stained glass windows, the intricate and precise math that demands each row has the correct stitch count so you can proceed to the next row and not have doom fall upon your head.



The Swallowtail Shawl.  My personal kryptonite.





An Elizabeth Zimmermann tribute shawl. 



Batik, up close (obviously). 



Oh.  Haruni.  Oh. 



As an aside, I have been re-reading The Pillars of the Earth, and while it is not a knitting book, I found there were some similarities between knitting lace and building a cathedral.  In the book (spoiler alert), when there was a divergence from the plan the architect had drawn up, do you know what ended up happening?  Cracks began to appear in the walls, and eventually the roof caved in. 

What does this have to do with knitting lace?  Well, when you (read: me) get to the end of a row, and you are short one stitch, and you decide to just "wing it" and increase another stitch to make it all "work out" ok, you have already destroyed your lace.  Your roof has caved in already, my dear.  Especially when a couple of rows after that, you suddenly find you are short yet another stitch, and later on you have three extra stitches, wildly enough.  Why, how could this happen?  You only just futzed it a little bit.  Isn't knitting a rather organic, fluid art?  How can one or two extra little stitches cause such havoc?  You don't have disaster strike when you have a couple extra stitches on your hand knit sweater, for cripes' sake!



That's when my knitterly tendency to duck my head and plow on through and live in knitting denial (a real, pervasive Syndrome, I'm sure) backfires in its most spectacular way.  Imagine having the first half of your lace shawl having the exact right amount of pattern repeats, and once you cross the midline, your flying buttresses holding up the roof suddenly are multiplying like rabbits...being rabbits.  When you get to the point where there's no denying it any further.  Your steeple is leaning to the left like a drunk on Saturday night.  Oy vey.  There's no fixing it as you go at this point.  This calls for a full out swan dive in to the frog pond.

Ribbit. 



This is the most dignified frog I've ever seen.  He probably believes in KDS (Knitterly Denial Syndrome). 

I have been struggling in vain against the call of the lace shawl lately.  Specifically, Vlad. 


After some hemming and hawing, I got on the horse, cast on my stitches, and started up.  Things were going swell until my little issue with stitches popped up, somewhere in the second chart.  I winged it, like I mentioned earlier.  Added a stitch here, misunderstood that a double yarn over was meant to be purled into twice on the wrong side, rather than having the second yarn over dropped to make a larger hole.  I ended up with a cathedral that had the steeple tilting madly to the left like some sort of weird surreal/Cubist painting.  Like any good knitter, I turned to Facebook for help on whether or not to frog.  My friend nailed me right off the bat.  "Could you live with a lace shawl tilting that much?" she asked.  Knowing how much I revere and admire the precision of lace, I knew what I had to do. 

Rip.

The thing that kills me about lace is that it's so hard to pull off the needles, rip back, and get back on the needles again, knowing where you are and how many stitches you ought to have at that point.  So there is a little invention called lifelines.  A lifeline is a length of yarn you leave at certain points in your shawl knitting that stay in that row as you continue knitting onward.  I've heard you can just leave a set of circular needles as a lifeline, but I don't have multiple pairs of the same size needle, but it's a neat idea.  It is a guaranteed save point in your knitting, like a back up drive for your shawl.  If it crashes, you can go back to your last "save point", reload your knitting needles in place of the yarn length, and continue on, without losing thousands of carefully crafted, perfect stitches.  This time I may have done a little overkill on the lifelines, but better safe than sorry.



My husband is a good man with helpful hands. 

I'm keeping all my lifelines in place, from the transition from the setup chart to the first pattern repeat, and for each successive pattern repeat.  If I remove the old ones, I can't be sure my rusty brain will remember at what part of the pattern I put in the last lifeline, hence rip.   On another note, the yarn here is Ella Rae Lace Merino and the colors present in this particular colorway (which I can't recall what it is, since the label is buried in the middle of my yarn ball right now) really remind me of a spectacular twilight/sunset.

My friend is also attempting to knit some lace.  When I talked to her earlier today, right off the bat she said she was doing something stupid.  "Oh really?" I asked.  "Yeah," she replied calmly.  "I'm trying to knit lace and watch "Game of Thrones" at the same time."  What was stupid about that?  She was having trouble knitting what she claimed was the simplest lace ever:  My So Called Life Lacey Scarf.  "All I want," she continued, "is lace to watch TV by."

That, and world peace.