From the depths of time

I'm not scared of lace. Not at all. I mean, I tat, right?

Okay, I'm a little scared of lace. I can knit and crochet lace stitches like there's no tomorrow, as long as it's with nice safe worsted weight. My knitted lace never looks like the pictures and my thread crochet always buckles and ripples on me.

I've had some lovely lace weight yarn in my stash for ages. Every once in a while, I pull it out, fondle it, try a few stitches, cock my head from side to side, decide it looks like crap, pull it out and stuff it back in my stash again. Yeah, I'm a little scared of lace.

I finally decided to suck it up. It's time to work my way through my stash and put some new things in my shop. I just had to figure out what to do with the yarn. Lots and lots of false starts later, I landed on the perfect thing.

I knew from the start, I wanted it to be a shawl. Knitting seemed to be out of the question until I can learn more about patience and probably try blocking some of my swatches. (There, I admitted it, I don't tend to block things unless I absolutely have to.) I searched through all the books I've downloaded from antiquepatternlibrary.org and finally found something that looked simple enough to play with.

It was a circular shawl and I don't really like having to fold a great big circle over to drape it around my shoulders. I worked several rounds of the pattern as written until I figured out where to basically cut out a piece of the shawl pie. I did the foundation as written, and the edging as written, adding a few additional rows until it felt like the perfect length. And Ta-da!

I just love the way this turned out! The picture is awful, but I had to take it in my bathroom because it was raining all day yesterday. Better pictures coming soon and probably my version of the pattern. Stay tuned for that.

I'm working on another one in a solid color yarn that will be bigger. This first one is the perfect size for keeping the chill off your shoulders, but I want to see if I can make a larger one that will look as good. We shall see.