I added pattern rows to make this blanket bigger and ended up with a blanket that is 35 inches by 35 inches after blocking.

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I used just a little under 2 skeins of Heritage sock yarn, and I made the blanket larger than the pattern calls for.

The reason I rated the difficulty of this pattern as “medium” is because it requires a circular start which can be difficult for someone who has never tried one before.

The reason I gave the pattern a 2-star rating is because although the pattern is a paid pattern, the actual instructions for it are quite sparse. There are several pages and many pictures illustrating how to do the circular cast on starting with a crochet ring, but that is information that is readily available on the Internet.

Also, the actual lace pattern is nowhere illustrated in the PDF pattern. The blanket pictured on the pattern leaves out an entire section of lace, so if you follow the pattern, your blanket will not look like the one pictured on the pattern. When I looked a project pictures on Ravelry that had been knitted using the entire chart, I really didn’t like the way the “omitted” lace section looked, so I ended up modifying the pattern to get what I think is a better result.

The lace patterns are charted but not written out and there are no stitch counts given, which might present a problem for a novice lace knitter. And when it is time to bind off, the pattern just says to bind off. There are no suggestions for which bind offs to use. Once again, this would not be a problem for an experienced knitter of lace shawls, but it might be problematic for a novice.

Individually, these things are all pretty minor, but taken as a whole, it makes for a poorly-written pattern that isn’t worth the price.

Modifications:

I began the shawl with Rosemarie’s Belly Button Start and Magic loop. I personally think that the Belly Button Start is the easiest method for starting a shawl knit in the round from the center out and I think it gives a much nicer result than the crochet start (Emily Ocker) while being easier to handle than the Pinhole Cast On.

I wanted the blanket to be bigger than the pattern, so I did two more repeats of the alternating eyelets, ending with 109 stitches/7 eyelets per quarter.

I left out the lace patterns on rows 14, 16, 18, and 20 on chart C and just knitted those rows plain. (Good luck with trying to read the line numbers on the charts.)

I’m beginning to wish I had gone with my first inclination and just used the Kerry Blue Square pattern from Traditional Knitted Lace to knit a baby blanket, but all my knitting books are still packed away from when we moved house and I didn’t feel like rooting through boxes. I will block this, and if I don’t like the finished blanket, I’ll knit another baby blanket using the Kerry Blue pattern. I have 3 more skeins of the yarn which should be enough to do a Kerry Blue Square.

August 26, 2016: I finally washed and blocked the blanket. I stretched it lightly to 36 inches square, and when I unpinned the blanket after it had dried, it sprung back an inch, so the finished side is 35 inches square.

All in all, I’m pleased with how this blanket turned out, but had I not been an experienced lace knitter, it probably would have been a disaster because the instructions are crappy and the pattern itself leaves a bit to be desired. I think the mods I made improved the blanket a lot.