Scotland the Brave

About 18 months ago I started a Shetland-style shawl with a Scottish theme in celebration of my first trip back in about 10 years. I made great progress through the center Saltire (the Scottish flag is called the Saltire or St Andrew's Cross). Then I breezed through the thistle (see Heradry section) border. But when it came to knitting off the edging, I faltered. Considering there were something over 1,000 stitches to knit off it's not surprising. About that time came along a number of other projects and the shawl got moved to the side table from which it would call and let out sad cries. I resisted. Until the last couple of weeks.

I finally got it temporarily finished last night. Temporarily because as I looked it over, I realized I'd made some major mistakes in the edging. Not little niggly things but major things. It's ugly. Real ugly. Heartbreakingly ugly. I was so focused on getting all those little stitches off my needle that I didn't notice. It wasn't the pattern. The pattern was gorgeous and easy. It seems that the places I hit bumps were:

1. When I picked it up after it sat for a year
2. When I knitted while my eyes were closing with exhaustion
3. When I was watching The Bourne Identity

I tried to pretend it didn't matter. I tried to pretend it was okay. But I knew it did matter and that it wasn't okay. I love the shawl and the design and the fact that it's 64" x 64". Just what I wanted and what I saw when I started planning it. You can see the thistles in the border but I also used a climbing vine pattern for the corner sections and am very pleased with how that came out. So there's no way that I could leave it. I'm doing the edging over, knitting it on its own and then I'll attach it later. I think it will go much faster that way. At least I'm telling myself it will.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the finished project:

(blocked on a red cover)


(in daylight and foled in half)

One down…234 to go

Woohoo! I’ve finished the border for the Saltire & Thistle shawl. 708 stitches. I did finally decide on a knitted border. It’s one taken from one of the Weldon’s Practical Needlework books I bought in Wisconsin a while back. I’ve figured out this book was from around 1890 and, although everyone keeps saying the old patterns are riddled with mistakes, this one was right on.

Round and Round

It’s been a while since I’ve had this kind of weekend. Of course, I always knit on the weekend but this weekend has been overdrive – in circles and circles. Remember the old mommy, mommy jokes? Mommy, mommy, I’m tired of running in circles. Shut up or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor. Seems kind of crude now but at 8 years old, that's funny, I don’t care who you are!

I’ve been fleshing out my 2-hour program on lace knitting to a 9-hour course and have been having a ball. But the overflow of that is that I’ve been a lace knittin’ fool. I’ve got 3 lace projects that I’ve had on the needles, one since February. This weekend, two of them got the business, especially the Shetland-style one. I worked 18 rounds on it in the past 3 days and considering it’s got over 600 stitches, I’d say that was a feat. Then I also worked about 35 rows on my Paisley shawl. Of course, that one’s only about 80 stitches but it’s patterned on both sides.

I’m nearing, I won’t call it the end because I still have the knit off edging, but I’m nearing the point where I can start knitting off the edging. I have to make the final determination about what edging I’m going to use and, at this point, I’m tempted to use a crocheted edging or small knit edging but I’ll have to take a breath when I finish the border to see what’s what.

The Paisley shawl is getting a little boring because you have to repeat this same pattern 6 times before you start the more interesting bit but I’m still enjoying it. We’ll see how I do when I have to join the middle and do 6 more of this pattern repeat. Maybe there will be enough between now and then to get me ready for it!

Oh, and one more thing. I did a class on knitting with jewelry wire and beads a couple of weeks ago and wanted to show you this. It’s something new I did as a sample because I didn’t really have a necklace to show. I love how it came out and it was a big hit with the class. I knitted over 3 stitches, passing the beads on every row and then, when I was finished with the necklace part, I took this wire disc I’d found somewhere and wove the blue wire I’d used in the necklace through it to pull it into the overall design and also to tone it down a little bit. I just want to wear it all the time!

You take the high road, I'll take the low road

and I'll be in Scotland afore ye.


I’ve finally gotten back to the Saltire and Thistle Shawl. I put it aside because the thistles in the pattern are going to wrong way. I kept thinking I would spend some time working out how to reverse the pattern, which I’m fairly sure is a pretty easy thing. Thing is, though, I’m not and it’s been sitting patiently by my chair with the border halfway done. I’ve finally embraced the fact that I’m not going to do anything with the thistle pattern and have come to the realization that if the thistle pattern wants to be upside down, I’m jolly well going to let it be upside down. Who am I, after all, to tell the thistle which way it has to face. Here’s my ‘prototype.’ I don’t have a new photo but this is what I’m making except this one is where I’ve done the thistle pattern wrong.

Again, don’t get me wrong. It’s pretty and very uniform so that it looks like it was done on purpose – and it was – but it’s not a thistle. It came out more like a shell. Pretty but not a thistle.

So now I’m doing one with a thistle. The other thing I’m doing differently is in the corner sections. In this photo, you can see I just did plain stockinette stitch in this original 'prototype' shawl because I wasn’t sure how things would go. I decided to go plain and figure out how the shaping works.

On this one, I’m doing a Shetland eyelet pattern, in keeping with the Scottish theme – Saltire (Scottish flag) in the middle, thistles and the Shetland eyelet pattern in the border and then I’ll do a wide knitted off border (over the almost 600 stitches there will be around by the time I finish the border. You're right if you're thinking the prototype doesn't have an edging. I was doing it to learn the technique so I didn't go to the trouble of doing the edging, I just crocheted it off.

I figure I should be finished with the border in the next week or so and then the edging will take a while. The last time I did a simple garter knitted edging, it took me about 3 months to do it!! I’m a fast knitter but having to knit the equivalent of 1200 rows takes a while, I don’t care who you are!

It's nice to embrace the realities of life and enjoy the process of knitting a beautiful shawl that will remind me of my life in Scotland. They not facing the wrong way, they're just facing the other way.

Yupo, Ipo, Wepo

I had my last watercolor class on Tuesday – which ended with us being in the basement of the Hogeland Center for 30 minutes with the rehearsing cast of Hello, Dolly. Very cosy.

But before the tornado sirens started, our teacher brought samples of a new sort of ‘paper’ being used by lots of watercolorists right now. It’s called Yupo and it’s basically like a thin plastic sheet made, I believe, from recycled goods. The thing the artists like about it is because it doesn’t use any tree pieces. Which means it also doesn’t soak up the paint which means the paint just gets sort of pushed around the surface which is a whole new way of working with watercolors.

Here’s the first thing I did with it. One of the fun things is that, if you don’t like what you did, you can just take it over to the sink and wash it right off! Yep, wash it right off with the water and the soap (I believe the Windex worked, too). Can you tell it's supposed to be dark waves crashing on a rock shore?

You certainly can’t do layers very well and you have to work with much less water than you might otherwise do. I liked just being able to go over and over it until you get the interaction of the colors right.

Evidently watercolor painters are doing weird and wonderful things with it. I don’t know if I’d like it for a steady diet but it was certainly fun to play with. It also comes in transparent form which could be very, very interesting, don’t you think?

On the knitterly front, my fingers haven’t fallen off since finishing the Balmoral so I’ve got the border started on the Saltire and Thistle Shawl. I bet you don’t even remember it. Well, it’s back up to the top of the list and the pattern is working out terrific. I’ll soon be starting the little leaf pattern for the corner sections and the thistle leaf border pattern is working out nicely. After I fixed the western side, that is. I started out with 101 stitches on each side, as I should, but somehow by the time I’d gotten to the 3rd round, I’d inherited 3 extra stitches. Don’t have a clue where they came from, just showed up for the party but I dealt with them (after I’d counted 8 times and redone the section 3 times and finally realized that I hadn’t counted the actual total number of stitches – 104. Yeah, that’d be it.) But now it’s working along nicely.

I’m also about 1/3 of the way through my ponchette. I’ll post pictures of that tomorrow but changing the pattern to stockinette stitch created some space I hadn’t anticipated but I couldn’t bear to tear it out again so I’ve just soldiered on. I did decide that I would embroider some beads onto it and I have some shell beads that I think will look fab. I’ll get those out for the pics and show you on the next post.

Making progress

I finished the center of my Saltire & Thistle Shawl. Since the next step is to pick up 100 stitches along each side, I decided to lightly block it. It sure beats trying to fight the curly edges.

And to help me pick up the stitches evenly across the row, I’ve put coiless safety pins at the 4 even points across each row and I will pick up 25 stitches between each pin. I can’t remember who gave me that tip but it’s one which is a great help. Usually I would use stitch markers between each pattern repeat but the way this thistle lace pattern (from Barbara Walker’s second volume) repeats, I won’t be able to do that. Also, traditionally one would work each side of the border individually but I’m going to work it all together in the round.


I've also been pondering what color to make my next Dalek. At first I sort of thought this (they're gold nowadays):



But then, last night, I watched "Genesis of the Daleks" and decided I might go with an early color scheme:

The early ones sported a much more industrial look that I kinda like in a Dalek.

Progress Report

Today is report on progress day.

Life has been happening so I haven’t been doing too much lately but here’s what’s going on.

Collette Socks: Got this on my UK trip and I love the colors but I wasn’t sure how the yardage would work so I’ve done shortie socks. I’ll wait until I get the second one done and if I have leftover yardage, the plan is to then go back and work the tops up. Anyway, it’s just a basic sock.

Dalek Central: This is a pattern from a fellow Whovian – she did a great job on it, too, even though it was only like the second thing she’d ever knit. Pattern is fun and easy but, alas, due to ‘licensing’ is no longer available generally though I think there is a way to get it from one of the Dr. Who groups on Ravelry. It’s done except for the base and the stuffing and I think it’s so cute! I’m dead pleased with it. For the purl rows, since purling the entire round is awkward for me on double points, I started practicing with the Portuguese-style purling and it’s working great. I haven’t got my pin done but, since this is perle cotton and therefore not so heavy, I just used a coil-less pin on my left shoulder which worked great. It’s been great practice and it’s solved my dp purling challenges!

Saltire and Thistle Shawl: I finally got back to this on my trip home last week. In fact, I got carried away and knit the first half of the middle way, way, way too far (Danish sweater too far). I sat and ripped as my mother groaned just watching me. In fact, I’m still knitting off the overflow! Way too far. Anyway, it’s on track now and I really like the cross. If you’ve seen the entries from the ‘test’ version, the cross was one of the things I needed to improve. I just have a little bit more before I pick up for the thistle border. Of course, being lace, it doesn’t look like much yet but just you wait!

New Thistle Design “Balmoral” Dinner Cloth: I said I wasn’t going to start a new knitted lace doily but this dinner cloth totally drew me in. It’s from the “Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting” from Marianne Kinzel and it has been staring at me since I got it several weeks ago. I think I’m going to try to go whole hog on this and do the full dinner cloth but we’ll have to see how that goes. It’s one of those patterns that you can stop at different points.

And that’s it. A little bit of everything as usual! I think I’m going to try to get the socks finished this weekend because I have some other sock yarn that I want to get started with next and I think it will be with a little fancier pattern. I have a pattern I did a couple of years ago with some braided cables that I just got written up so I think I’ll use this new sapphire blue yarn to test that pattern with.