Shelda's Adventures with Lace

Elizabeth on the needles

Way back when Myrna Stahman was getting ready to publish Stahman's Shawls and Scarves, I volunteered to be one of her "proof knitters." I very much enjoyed this process, and made two swatches in very different yarns for the "Elizabeth" Shawl, but then never managed to actually start the shawl. At first I didn't think I liked my swatch much, but after it was dressed and I looked at it more, it grew on me. So when I started thinking again about knitting one of the shawls from the book, I kept coming back to the "Elizabeth." There are so many beautiful shawls in the book that it's very hard to make a decision.

Here's a photo of the original Elizabeth swatch I made back in 1999, using silk/wool Jaggerspun Zephyr in "Dianthus" on 3.5mm needles. At least I did make a note about the needle size I'd used, though it did take me awhile to find the paper it was written on!

I read through all the instructions carefully, including the chapter about sizing the shawls for a fine yarn (Zephyr qualifies) and/or larger body sizes (I quality). Myrna says that the number of stitches you pick up from your neck band to start your shawl "should measure approximately 40%-45% of the shoulder-to-shoulder measurement" of the person who will wear the shawl. My shoulder-to-shoulder measurement is 18 inches, so the range is 7.2 inches (40%) to 8.1 inches (45%).

My gauge, measured over the swatch, is 6.6666 stitches to the inch. So I need to start in the vicinity of 48 - 54 stitches. The "Elizabeth" as charted in the book begins with 27 stitches, and the building block increment is 18 stitches. 27+18 gives me 45 stitches, while 27+36 would give me 63 stitches. So a little too few or a few too many ;). I decided to go with the smaller number, but do a longer shoulder shaping (there are two blocks in the shoulder shaping shown, and I plan to do three, subject to draping the shawl around my shoulders at that point to see how it falls. One of the advantages of working top-down!

I spent a frustrating hour trying to find out why I had an extra stitch in my counts until I found an errata email that I had saved from Myrna. It applies only to the first edition of the book. Here's the gist of it: for all of the shawl patterns with a seed stitch band (Idella, Alberta, Alka, Barbara, Susan, Gracie, Anne, Frances, Elizabeth and Josephine), you need to decrease both ends of your seed stitch band to 6 stitches from the 7 you begin with. One end is clearly detailed, but the other K2tog is missing from the instructions. Click here for the full wording of the errata.

So, with that problem solved, I cast on my 7 stitches with a provisional cast-on and began knitting! Hurray! I didn't have enough of the "Dianthus" color Zephyr, so I'm using "Elderberry." The one shawl Myrna details knitted from Zephyr took less than four ounces, but since I'm making mine somewhat larger (and may also want to make it longer), I feel very safe with the eight ounces that I have of this yarn.

Here's a first look at the shawl on the needles, though the color doesn't show up very well (Elderberry is a very lovely muted purple). I've just finished 20 rows of knitting.

There's a sweet story about how I came by this yarn, and I get a chance to plug one of my favorite lace vendors: Sandy Terp of Moonrise. I ordered 8-ounces of Jaggerspun's merino yarn in Elderberry, and Sandy sent the Zephyr (silk/merino) by mistake. When I wrote to her about it, she sent me the yarn I had originally ordered and told me just to keep the yarn she'd already sent, and pass along her kindness to someone else. Customer service doesn't get much better than that!

Posted by Shelda at June 24, 2003 03:48 PM