Wandering Aimlessly Shawl

I joined a "Twitter Knit Along" about a week ago which was the brain child of @SpazzyYarn. She put up a blog post about it, took opinions on different patterns, etc and then began a series of polls where we involved could go and vote on our favorite pattern in each catagory and then finally out favorite pattern out of those top picks.

The pattern picked was from a lace shawl pattern on Ravelry called Travelling Woman. I had never done lace pattern before and since I figured I'd get it wrong and bumbling my way though it I named mine Wandering Aimlessly. It was a beautiful leafy lace pattern, that was actually really easy to do once you got the hang of it. The pattern called for the use of stitch markers which messed me up royally so I pulled the knitting out and began again without them; smooth sailing after that!

I also ended up with an odd number of stitches at the end of the rows, even though I counted and counted. So instead of doing whatever the last few extra stitches on each row called for (after the last pattern repeat) I just repeated as much of the pattern as I could before the yarn-over, k2 for the garter stitch border. Since each row increased 2 stitches every row the extra pattern I was doing got larger and little by little more leaves apeared so it worked out well!

I had 2 skeins of "Mini Mochi" sockyarn by Crystal palace which Tony had given me for Christmas. I decided to use those because it was the only appropriate weight yarn I had enough of, and I used a size 8 needle because it was the only circular needle I own. The 2 skeins of yarn gave me a total of 390 yards of yarn to work with.

I did the stockinette the pattern asked for, ending with 159 stitches before beginning chart A. I did 4 repeats of chart A and then began B. On beginning the 7th row of chart B I realized I would quickly run out of yarn, so I changed the pattern a little. I worked the "leaves" (yo, k(x),slk2p,k(x),yo) as directed by the pattern but between them I switched to yo (yarn over),k2tog until it was time to repeat the leaf pattern. This gave me a serious of "holes" and allowed the leaves to form "points" as they finished. I bound off and had about 5 yards of yarn left!!!

I will need to block it again since I don't really know what I'm doing. I straight-pinned the wetted shawl to a bath towl but it pulled in a little in places. Maybe I can invest in some of those rods when we get our tax return back in a week or so! As it is though the shawl measures approx. 60" across the widest point by 22" long!

I love it. This was a real challege for me and stretched my creative ability! I resolved to knit less boring (in other words, more complex) things this year and I think this is a great start!



If you're on Twitter you can search the keyword "#TwitKAL" and see what we're saying about our projects and see pics of other's process/finished shawls!

If you're on Ravelry you can look at my other projects by clicking on:
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/Hamncheezr