You know when you have a really great idea in your head for a knitted project, and then you spend AGES on it and it doesn’t work out too well? That's what my green jacket thing is doing to me right now.
It’s amazing how long it takes to knit a sleeve. I’m still on the first one of my secret project, but at least I’m an inch or so from the end. I’m going to try putting a row in between each bit of joined i-cord because my other attempt came out a bit tight. The bad thing though about sleeves is that I’m about to do it all over again!
I cast on Luna Moth yesterday! I guess that’s not all that much of a surprise since I’ve been chomping at the bit to get started. I realised that 4.5mm needles were what I should use so I didn’t need to wait until I’d finished with them from my other project.
Monday: Cone of black yarn arrives, promised by mother-in-law, gets buried in van-full of bedroom and living room furniture, bed and half a tonne of curtains and bed linen. I do love when my family have a sort out!
Did I tell you I’ve started an Aeolian? I ordered the yarn and beads with my birthday money – 2,500 seed beads and 200g of Patons Pure Wool 2ply. The only colour I could find for sale this side of the pond was white, but there were projects on Ravelry of the same yarn in all the different colours of the rainbow! I eventually (after a lot of searching) found the beads on the bead store, which is a shop based in Cornwall, so the postage wasn’t too extortionate! You’d be amazed how difficult it is to find size 8/o seed beads! I bought 2,500 TOHO round beads in Ceylon Aqua and it came to about £13.00, which wasn't bad – though their hexagonal seed beads were half price, I wasn’t sure if they’d look right.
Returning to the title of this post, she actually only got caught up in it, but she still managed to pull about half a dozen tiny beaded laceweight stitches off the needle. I caught what I thought was all of them and stopped the laddering but realised a few rows later that I'd dropped a yarn-over as well and not picked it up with the others.
You may wonder why I'm not having a breakdown at this point, after all these rows are getting quite long and the thought of tinking back all those stitches AND searching out the beads that have pinged off into a corner of the room is disheartening to say the least. I'll admit my first panicky solution was to undo the lot and start again, but thankfully common sense prevailed. Quite simply put, I dropped the offending stitches and reknit them, with all the other stitches safely on the needle, now you can't even tell the difference! The silver lining to this cloud is that as well as re-affirming my confidence in my own abilities as a knitter, I'm also able to bring to you (as soon as I've finished editing the photos) a step-by-step photo tutorial of how I did it!
Sent from my BlackBerry Smartphone from Virgin Media
It’s finally finished! I cheated slightly because I knit it shorter than it was meant to be, I think I’ve got about 75g of yarn left and I can’t be sure that would have been enough for the full length version. Still it’s a really nice length for me – the point skims my bottom (I'm quite short!).
Photofest!
Pre-blocking. I also hadn’t sewn in the ends, I was that excited for it to be finally “finished”!
I blocked it on the futon mattress thingy, which is a small double. It wouldn’t fit length-ways and only barely diagonally, it looks a bit wonky and if I had more room the points would be pointier, but it looks ok now it’s dry. I think if I start knitting more shawls I’ll at least need something decent to block stuff on!
Finished! Sorry for the bad lighting but it was late evening by the time I had taken all the pins out and finished parading around in it! Once I get a photo of it in action I’ll post it here.
Vital Statistics:
The Pattern: Garden Path Shawl by shui kuen kozinski
Yarn was: Rowan Pure Wool Aran in “Blood”
Needles needed: 5mm (pattern called for 5.5mm
Other stuff needed: Stitch markers – I used 8 bits of knotted yarn, which I think are just as good as anything you can buy!
Knitting Time: About a month
Amount of sewing up to do: none except for sewing in ends!
I know I know I’ve not posted for ages AGAIN, but I have been busy, honest!
Firstly, although I’ve not done too much work on the shawl, I’ve at least reached the third row of roses and added a life line. 
As for my other projects, I found and adapted some patterns for premature baby clothes, and although the jacket I knitted worked quite well, I’ve yet to find one that works for mittens and booties. That’s now on my (extensive) list of things to do, but I’ve elected to work on my shawl a bit first. I’ve also been rereading the Necroscope series by Brian Lumley, a series about vampires and telepathy in cold war Britain/USSR.
This is my answer whenever anyone asks me how I’m getting on. There’s not much else I can say really, because the milestone of switching from the body to the edging is a long way off, and even though I’m less than forty rows away (a bit further than in this most recent picture), those rows are ever increasing in size!
I’ve decided (just to be sure) that after I knit the third line of roses I’ll add a lifeline, that way if I do end up still being short on yarn, I can rip back and just make it a bit shorter. I’ll be really upset if I run out again though!
It’s funny how it looks like a lot less yarn than I started with!
Well that's it’s official nickname now, because it feels like that's what it’s going to take to knit it. Let me tell you the story.
The pattern, Garden Path Shawl, by Shui Kuen Kozinski is gorgeous and takes just under 1000m of worsted weight yarn (that works out to be one kilometre!). I chose not to use the recommended yarn but went with Rowan’s Pure Wool Aran (in the shade “blood”, I’m sure that was an omen!), and calculated how many balls I’d need to make up the 1000m. According to my calculations (which I checked and rechecked quite a lot, because I tend to worry about these things anyway) I should have had about 3 quarters of a ball left over, if not more. You can guess where I’m going with this can’t you? Believe it or not, by my guesstimates I’m short by maybe a ball and a half. Now I could imagine using half a ball more than stated, because I may be knitting quite loosely, but surely not by enough to make that sort of difference? The long and short of it (no pun intended) is that I’ve cast my net far and wide but I can’t for the life of me find balls in the same dye lot that are the same or even similar, so I’m stuck with having to reknit it, maybe on needles a size smaller and maybe missing out a few rows, which I’d really hate to do.
But that’s where I'm up to with the blood shawl, and it’s still sitting in the naughty corner because every time I look at it I think of all the hard work and concentration that went into it, and how much is still left to go.
