Summary: Lovely pattern, makes a few assumptions about a knitter’s understanding of lace but really pleasant and easy to follow. Making it in sock-yarn required 4.5 repeats of the main body & edging as written in pattern.

Made using 3.5mm metal Knit Pro needles for body & 4mm wooden Knit Pros for the edging lace.

Notes:
05/08/12: Up to row 16 of the “Beginning and body of scarf” section.

Not the most spelled out pattern, but also not a difficult or badly written pattern by any means. It just makes a few assumptions about your grasp of lace. Patience, reading carefully & counting at the end of every RS row should get me there!

Yarn a tad splitty, especially if tinking back a bit, but it gets the job done and the colour is magical!

07/08/12: 25 rows so far. Getting better at following so that I finish with the right number of stitches per row, but I still count them at every row!

Colour is looking nice so far, and I don’t think I’ve made any significant mistakes yet (hopefully!)

19/08/12: Done 3 repeats of the main pattern so far, thinking of doing two and a half more since it’s still quite small.

Yarn looks great, colour looking fabulous now that it’s growing, but does stain my hands with purple dye like there’s no tomorrow.

23/08/12: Today’s lesson: When doing a lacey pattern, pick big needles both to show off the lace and to make it go quicker. I suspect that using 4.5mm needles would’ve made the project look even better. 15 rows left for the main body pattern (4.5 repeats), then the 16 edge rows.

It won’t be a humongous shawl, but great for wearing with a coat this autumn/winter.

28/08/12: Wow, once soaked and blocked, it grew from 31” x 16” to 51” x 23.5” so it’s now beautifully drapey!

Incredibly happy with the finished result. The yarn was a pain to work with (very splitty & the dye came off on my hands pretty badly). As my first lacework, I’m really happy with it and can’t wait to cast on the next one.

Explanation I gave to another Raveler who needed a hand:
Here’s how the first line of the body of shawl goes (since that’s where I started getting really frazzled)

• K2 (your garter edge which will be K2 whether you’re on a right or wrong side)
• Move your marker
• YO then repeat what’s in square bracket until you get to your first central marker
• YO, move your marker, K1, move your next marker

That K1 above will become your “spine” in the middle of the shawl, so what you to now is a perfect repeat of the previous one, except for the K2 which will go on the other edge.

• Now start from the star * (YO) and do the same number of repeats as before, which will take you to your final two stitches
• YO before you move the marker, move the marker, then do your border K2

That’s row 1 of the body sorted.

Row 2 (wrong side) requires a bit of “reading your stitches”; Always K2 at the edges, but otherwise you knit the ones that are wearing a V around their neck and purl the ones with a bump around their neck. You’ll start seeing the patterns after a few rows and will basically have “veins” of knits on the wrong side going down in parallel rows, while the majority of your wrong side is all purls.

It’s a pretty forgiving shawl, so long as you have the right number of stitches - I literally counted EVERY ROW for the first 10-15 rows to make sure I got the right rhythm and didn’t forget any YO’s.