Sunday, July 22, 2007

Easy Does It

After the angst of toe-up sock #1, I decided I wanted to knit something easy, something brainless, something I could start right now with yarn onhand because my LYS went out of business.

When said LYS had their going-out-of-business sale, I glommed onto some Cascade 220, so I grabbed a skein of black and rolled it into a center-pull ball (without the fiasco I went through before). Then I started a lacy shawl from a pattern in the 2007 Knitting Pattern-a-Day Calendar (the April 25 entry). This pattern calls for Fiesta Boucle, and I tried it once using Lion Boucle, but the two yarns are obviously not interchangable and I didn't have enough yarn and I quickly abandoned this project. But, really, a lacy shawl can be knit from about any type yarn; you just get different results.

To make a long story short, I tried the Cascade 220 with different size needles until I found a result I liked, but the more I knit, the less I liked the result. The photo in the pattern made the shawl look rectangular, but for some reason mine was coming out at a diagonal.



And one edge looked like this...



... while the other edge looked twice as thick.



I really like things to look symmetrical, so this shawl bugged me enough that I ripped it and tried to figure out some way to get the results I wanted. My knitting stitch skills are not up to creating my own lacy shawl pattern, though. So I switched to a one-skein shawl pattern I found here. Again it took me a while to decide on needle size, and I decided that it was okay by me if I wound up with a sweater-shawl hybrid.



So this shawl will consist primarily of stockinette with lacy borders. Since this is meant to be my "menopause shawl" - something I can take off and put on with ease as I cycle through hot flashes - I think it will do just fine.

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