Initial swatch, 4 vertical repeats and 1 horizontal (20 stitches wide), blocked, measures 3.75” square. A slight scallop remains after blocking on the cast-on edge.

Full cast-on 92 stitches (5x18+2)

Knit half, pick up stitches from cast-on edge and knit the other half to match the first.

Start setting beads on 29th vertical repeat of each half: 2 repeats with just 1 in the center of each fan, then 1 with 2 per, final repeat with 3 per.

After 19 vertical repeats, I’m wishing I had made this skinnier, maybe 4 blocks wide instead of 5, maybe even 3. It looks fabulous, but it’s taking forever and I’m getting impatient… and I’m not even 1/3 of the way in.

9 January 2015: OMG. I can’t believe I’ve been working on this for ~2.5 years. I keep putting it on the back burner because there are other projects that are more urgent or more exciting, and it never gets done. I think it’s time I finished it! My counter says I’ve got through the 20th repeat on the second end, so… 12 repeats left. 48 rows. C’mon, let’s just do this thing, right? I’m finishing up a project tonight, so I’ll go ahead and mark this as an active WIP and get back to it as soon as that last toe is grafted!

12 January 2015: Wow. This is going much faster than I remembered it doing. I’m down to the last 4 repeats already, the ones with the beads in them.

14 January 2015: Done, done, done, at long last. Have not blocked it, and may not--the amount of acrylic in this yarn will resist blocking, and the feather-and-fan looks pretty good without it anyway. There are things I’d change about how I executed it (most notably using a provisional cast-on, which I didn’t know how to do--or even that it existed!--when I began the project), but I’m still pretty happy with the result. Feels good to finally have it finished.

15 January 2015: “Why do the two bind-off edges look so different?” I wondered. Then I happened across my midway-done post on Tumblr and realized that the first edge was done with a lace bind-off. When I bound off the second edge last night, I had assumed that at the time of the first bind-off I hadn’t yet learned more than one way to do it and used the old standard one. Whoops! Oh, well. It’ll still be OK.