Shelda's Adventures with Lace

And now... the "Real Thing!"

It's a little amazing to be knitting on my actual shawl! All this fuss and bother with the chart, and the pattern, and the prototype, and hey, this is the real thing! (I had to laugh, Theresa, because I was already calling it that before I read your comment).

I spent about an hour and a half getting the shawl back on the needles after a goof-up (I wasn't paying attention, and knit about six rows past where I had intended to end my "darts" so I had to rip back, and I didn't have a life-line). It wasn't pretty, but you can frog lace, get the stitches back on the needles, and live to tell about it! I did feel a little like emulating Elizabeth Zimmermann's famous quote, that after cutting a steek, one should drink a nice glass of wine and go have a lie down in a dark room.

There's not a whole lot to see at this point (I'm about 22 rows into the knitting in the photo), but without further ado, I present "the real thing"

The shawl is white (no variegations in the yarn), and it's photographed here on a crinkly turquoise shopping bag that came from my yarn shop (don't ask what I was doing buying more yarn!) Although I'm knitting with the same 3.25mm needles as I used for the prototype, this yarn is significantly finer, and I have to pay fairly close attention to keep from losing stitches. This pattern is not one I would categorize as "easy," but it also has a pretty intuitive flow.

I'm calling this shawl the "Sallie June." There seems to be a long tradition of naming shawls (at least Faroese shawls) with a woman's name, and since I'm knitting this shawl for my mother, I had to name it after her. "Sallie June" isn't her actual legal name, and the story of her name is quite "Rocky Racoon"-esque ("Her name was McGill, and she called herself 'Lil,' but everyone knew her as Nancy!") Beatles' references aside, "Sallie June" seems like the right name for the shawl, so "Sallie June" it is!

And I'm really knitting it! The real shawl! Whee!

Listening to: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling, read by Jim Dale (I read the book as soon as it came out, but I love listening to Jim Dale!)

Um... okay... so now what?

After my last blog entry where I said I was just too impatient to take my shawl prototype off the needles to block and see what was going on, I realized that what I was really feeling was a touch of fear. I wasn't sure how it was going to come out, and I was avoiding finding out. So I metaphorically "bit the bullet," threaded the shawl onto a thread and off the needles, got it wet, and blocked it. And first I'll just say that's it truly lovely lace! I am just as enamored with this pattern as I was when I first encountered it.

That's the back panel. So far, so good! But, um... here are the fronts, merrily crossing over one another. Holy Toledo, Batman, I believe I went too far with my additional rays! I do like the way the shawl is approaching a circular shape, without too much additional length in the back. That's pretty neat. (Although it may also be an artifact of blocking it with the "wings" curving around the front. If I had blocked it more like a standard Faroese shawl, with the wings outstretched, it would be different. I'm just not sure how different!)

Here is just one front, photographed without the cross-over, allowing you to see how far the additional fabric extends past the center front line. Because of the angle of the photo, I think it appears a little less dramatic than it actually is.

Even seeing the blocked layout, I couldn't be sure until I tried on the shawl how it would hang. Unfortunately I can't manage to photograph myself very well, but I turned this way and that in front of the mirror. There is definitely too much fabric, and it ripples around my shoulders. Not a bad look, but not the look I wanted on this shawlette as I want the lace to show as clearly as possible. I found myself folding back the excess into lapels, and laughing to myself. This is why I started with a prototype, after all!

At this point, I have several options. I could go back to the "standard" two diamond start, or I could only do one vertical repeat before closing off the "rays" (see discussion here about rays and darts). I went as far in the direction of additional fabric as I could in this prototype (i.e. I used three diamonds to begin, and I ended my darts after two vertical repeats). That gives me a total of 6 lace diamonds after the first vertical repeat, and a total of 7 diamonds after the second repeat.

I made a little chart and determined that there are several possible ways to configure this.

If you start with 2 diamonds (Myrna's "standard" shawl configuration), and end the rays after one vertical repeat, you end up with 2/3/4 diamonds on the first three rows. Starting with two diamonds, and ending the rays after two vertical repeats, you have 2/4/5 diamonds on the first three rows.

If you start with 3 diamonds (the theory I was testing), and end the rays after one vertical repeat, you have 3/4/5 diamonds (the same as 2 diamonds, two vertical repeats, except for the extra diamond on the first row). You could end the front ray after the first vertical repeat, but continue the back ray until after the second repeat). That staggered plan would give you 3/5/6. Or you could do what I did, and max it out at 3/6/7. (I truly hope that might make sense to someone besides me!)

With that in mind, my first thought was that I should have stopped my "rays" after that first repeat. So I folded the shawlette strategically, and sure enough, the folding drew those front "wings" into a more reasonable line:

As I folded and tried on, it seemed to me that the two best options are the 2/4/5 and 3/4/5 ones. Since they're very close to the same result, I don't know that it matters a whole lot which I choose. I do like the look of the third set of leaf motifs at the shoulder. The diamonds seem to curve very gracefully in that configuration, so I think I'll go with the 3/4/5 option. I held my blocked swatch in the Merino Fine (the yarn I'm knitting the real shawl in) up to the blocked Jaggerspun Zephyr of the prototype, and the Merino Fine is the same width, but less deep.

I would love to distract myself, and play with another two or three prototypes to test out these theories, but I'm pretty sure I now have the information I need. I can always come back to this question later. I think I will eventually go ahead and finish this shawlette without frogging. I've already done the bulk of the knitting, and it can serve as a concrete illustration of an experiment I tried that wasn't entirely successful.

So there's nothing stopping me from picking up my needles and casting on my "Sallie June" Faroese shawl! Except for winding the yarn into a ball:

Listening to: Silas Marner by George Eliot, read by Margaret Hilton.

More good questions

Thanks to Theresa for more good questions! I do have a knitting font, one that I've been tinkering with for some time. Ages back, I purchased a knitting symbol font from XRX., Inc. (the folks who publish Knitter's Magazine). You can find them at The Knitting Universe. I don't know if the font is still available. I wasn't entirely happy with the font the way it was presented, as it had little boxes drawn around each symbol. I feel I have much more control with just the symbols themselves, inserted in the cells of an Excel worksheet (btw, I have my Excel row height set at 0.14" and my column width set at 0.15").

I have a program called Macromedia Fontographer (macintosh version), that I can use to tinker with fonts. I've done that, and come up with a font that has most of the symbols I need. I've cobbled it together from various symbol fonts, and it's still a work-in-progress. But it definitely is most helpful for lace charting.

Regarding my "shawlette-in-progress," I'm hoping to know the answers to Theresa's questions fairly soon. I've started on the lower border sections of the shawl, which include a 24-row section and a 20-row section. I'm at about row 20 of the first border section. At this point a pattern row and its return row (all purl except for the seed stitch borders) is taking about 45-50 minutes. So progress isn't speedy, but it's coming along!

And yes, Theresa, your question makes perfect sense, and is the very one I'm anxiously awaiting being able to answer for myself. I think the shawl may ripple around the shoulders, and it may not. With it on the needle, I can't quite tell yet. I was planning to put it on a thread and go ahead and block it, and then I got impatient and decided to just plunge ahead and see how it comes out!

Thanks to everyone who has said such nice things about the project. I don't really know if I'll manage to get the pattern ready for sale. I have a sock pattern I've been trying to write up for months now, and I'm not really sure pattern writing is my thing. But we'll see.

Listening to: When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? by George Carlin.

Ahhhh.... Charting!

Theresa asked a week or so back why I was recharting the lace from the Marianne Kinzel book to do my shawl. When I first started thinking about this shawl, one of my goals was to learn to chart lace on the computer (I don't much like working with a pencil and graph paper, I'd much rather type!) I knew also that I was going to need to do some re-arranging of elements in the charts, and it seemed like re-charting the existing charts would be a good way to get familiar with those elements, and learn more about lace charting in the process.

The "Springtime" cloth by Marianne Kinzel is in the First Book of Modern Lace Knitting, published by Dover Publications ©1972. (ISBN is 0-486-22904-1) Marianne Kinzel is a marvelous lace designer, and I've never heard of anyone finding an error in one of these charts, which is more or less unheard of in later lace books. Bless Dover for keeping these books available! (They also publish Kinzel's Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting.)

As much as I appreciate the patterns and the accuracy of the charts, I'm not wild about knitting directly from the Kinzel charts. I find the charts very visually "busy." There's a lot of information presented in any lace chart, but to my mind there are more and less pleasing ways to present that information.

Many lace charts (including the Kinzel charts) use a vertical line (l) for a knit stitch. I prefer an empty box for the knit stitch symbol. The Kinzel charts use an empty box for "no stitch," meaning that you simply ignore that box entirely. It's there only as a placeholder so that the real stitches line up better, making the chart look more like the lace that will be knit from it ("No stitch" symbols are necessary only when stitch counts change from row to row). Since I used an empty box to indicate a knit stitch, I shaded boxes with gray to indicate "no stitch."

Here is a scan of one of the original "Springtime" charts from Marianne Kinzel (used with permission from Dover Publications):

Here is a photo of my re-charting of this same pattern block, for comparison:

The colored symbol blocks were my attempt to differentiate between two symbols that I found tricky to distinguish on the Kinzel charts.

I find my own charts significantly easier on my eyes, but I want to emphasize that all of this is entirely a personal preference issue! When you're knitting lace, anything that makes the knitting flow more smoothly seems like a good plan, whether that's stitch markers at critical junctures in the knitting, a "life line" so that you feel more secure (this is a thread drawn through a row of knitting that will hold the stitches if you make a later mistake and have to rip back), or a system of counting rows and keeping track of your position in the chart. If it works for you, go for it!

I have had fun playing with lace charting (I have aspirations to one day design my own lace), and I've found Microsoft Excel a handy tool for the task. I've heard lots of recommendations for Adobe Illustrator for charting lace, but I haven't yet mastered it so I can't comment. Excel was easily at hand, so I started there.

Listening to: In the Moon of Red Ponies, by James Lee Burke, read by Will Patton.