The Yarn:
The Swatch:
and I’ve now cast on for the shawl itself and completed 1.5 of the 40 pattern repeats. I’ll need to take some pictures of the progress so far on the shawl since I made a few mistakes on the swatch and it doesn’t look nearly as good as the shawl.
Edited to add:
The Shawl:
(For the non-knitters, the dark yarn knitted on the bottom is a place-holder for the lace border that will eventually go there; my tastes are far too traditional to wear a shawl with a black border on my wedding day, unless I am genuinely in mourning!)
The yarn is fantastic to work with. It was a little ‘grabby’ when I tried to wind it so I ended up undoing a section of the skein (probably about a meter at a time) and then winding that section and then undoing the next section and winding that and so on. Amazingly this got me a better tension when winding than trying to wind continuously.
The only thing that is worrying me now is that I still have no idea how the border gets knitted on to the shawl afterwards. I keep looking at the instructions in the book and they make no sense whatsoever (why can’t lace knitting use the same terminology as ordinary knitting?). I’m also thinking that my plan of waiting until I’ve knitted the rest of the centre of the shawl and then trying to figure it out might not be the best policy. I guess I’m going to have to find some spare time and sit down with some scrap yarn and experiment.
I am loving working with the Knitpicks Options needles on this project. They’re nice and slippery, which is vital, because the yarn really isn’t. They’re also sharp enough that knitting through the backs of stitches or knitting lots of stitches together is very easy to do.
All in all, an excellent start!