For a friend’s wedding.

3/29: I had finished 14 rows of chart C when something happened, and all of a sudden I noticed I had a bunch of stitches off the needles. I wrestled with it for a couple of hours last night trying to make it right, but all my fixes looked like the south end of a dog heading north, so I frogged back to my lifeline at the end of chart B. Then of course it took me a couple more hours to pick the stitches back up.

Today I went to buy beads for the shawl. My plan is to start beading in chart D and continue to E. For all the leaves, I’ll bead a periwinkle 8/0 seed bead in each s2kp2; I think that’ll be 40 leaves * 7 stitches. On the spine, I will change the regular knits into kbl and I bought some amethysts, emeralds, and aquamarines for those stitches - briolettes and emerald cuts (birthstones for bride, groom, and baby). Then for the pattern-recommended bead row, I bought freshwater pearls (bridalish!) which I’ll place every third stitch via dental floss, rather than pre-stringing unless I figure out a compelling reason to do it the other way.

Hopefully all the beads will add weight without making the shawl want to fall off. Might have to seek out a shawl pin or brooch though.

3/30 Tweaking how I’m doing the beads by adding more on the body. On the first repeat of chart C, adding one bead per each s2k1psso on row 9. On the second repeat, will do on row 1 and 9. On third repeat, 1, 5, and 9. That will take me into chart D, where each one will be beaded, and it won’t be so abrupt.

4/3 Over the weekend, my Claudia Hand Painted silk lace totally failed me. As I wound the skein into a ball weeks ago, I noticed that it had several knots in it. Maybe 6? And I thought nothing of it, but knit with it as-is. But apparently that was the wrong thing to do, since one of the knots worked loose between the knit row and the purl row coming back. So my job now is to go back through the shawl, which only has 40 more rows to go, and find all the knots so that I can secure them (another knot, some fray stopper, maybe sewing with fine thread through them). I’ve found 4 so far. Le sigh.

4/8: Bound off last night. I tried my best to use real pearls along the edge, but the holes in all the real pearls I tried were just too small for the yarn, so I went with glass pearls. Dotted fray stopper on all the knots I could find. It makes the yarn hard, so use very sparingly.

Took out the lifelines this morning and stepped back to admire the shawl only to find a mistake in probably the most visible area possible - a leaf just next to the center spine about 6” from the bottom point. I think that if I just take some spare yarn and weave it through there to decrease the size of the gaping hole, it should be pretty much okay. What the heck did I do? Double yo? The mind boggles.

Blocking is waiting until I’m sure the fray stopper has had time to cure completely.

Update 7/22/2010: Reblocking this, as I had left it on a hanger and there were unsightly humps as a result. Boy does this yarn make a nice fabric, even if there was some annoyance with the knots.