The first thing I finished was the geometric miser’s bag I’ve been working on. I was moving right along when I ran out of thread but once I got more (and more than enough) I was able to finish it up fairly quickly. Every once in a while you make something that you just fall in love with; this is one of those for me. I definitely want to do others like this. The squared part is made from a cross stitch pattern so I’m going to try a few other projects with these patterns.
The second thing I finished was my prototype for my Scottish shawl. Here’s a shot of it as it was drying after being blocked. The original plan was to have the saltire (St. Andrew’s Cross) in the middle, then the thistle leaf pattern for the border and, finally, a knitted border. I did this prototype because I’d never done a Shetland shawl before and wasn’t quite sure how the middle would work out and because I wasn’t sure how the border section would work doing it all in the round. You’ll see the border looks more like seashells than thistle leaves. Ah, yes, well
there’s a story about that. I did it wrong. But at least I did it wrong consistently and made up my own different pattern! Happy accidents, don’t you love ‘em? I also wasn’t sure about the corners of the border. On this one I just did a stockinette stitch, which I’m not crazy about. But now I know I want to do a running vine pattern on the corners that should contrast nicely to the thistle pattern (once it’s actually done properly, that is!) and with this prototype, I can easily see how to work it in.
The nice thing, too, is that because so much of it was plain stockinette, this version went really quickly. The other adaptation I made was not working the knitted edging. I really didn’t want to invest that much time knowing it wasn’t going to be the “real thing.” I crocheted off the stitches and then did a couple of rounds of crocheted edging and I have to say that I kind of dig it. I think on another shawl of this type, I would definitely do a much larger crocheted edging as I think it would be really, really lovely and much faster than the knit off edging.
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