12/24/2011: Added some post-blocking pictures. I still love it. :)

I very much enjoyed working on this lace project. It’s my most ambitious to date.

I cast on about 6 times, trying to get the cast on right and to make it stop being so fiddly. I have a tough time with extra small yarn and larger needles.

I used 1 life line. I should have used more. I ended up tinking back a few times, just from my own mistakes.

The charts were great. The pattern was great. I would make this again, hopefully faster the second time.

I did take some breaks from this while I was working on it - sometimes the lace was too much for my brain to handle.

I did more repeats of the central vine motif - 7 total as opposed to the 5 (?) in the pattern. I think I should have done more, as I wanted this thing to be bigger than it is. I am not good at estimating how large a lace project will be after blocking, so this is my own fault really. Next time, I will use more repeats. Cuz they were fun.

Overall I think I did ok on this. There are some things I would like to get better at, there are some tricks I learned late in the game of making this that would be good to know at the beginning. Basically, lace is more delicate than other knitting (der) and as such, you should not make the start of the round where you start or stop - the tension on the yarn here is important to keep consistent with the rest of the piece so you can’t TELL it was the start of the round. Because I stopped all the time at the end of a round during the first stage of this project, the lace pattern does show the gaps larger than in other areas.

That’s ok. I learned this lesson and will apply it to future projects!

I’d like to do this again, but… bigger. :)