The cast-on bonanza bits are chugging along well.  So well in fact, I needed a longer circular needle for the inside out experiment thingie.  I looked in my rats’ nest of circular needles but no luck there.  Then I remembered, I had a good long one, the right size on an unfinished shawl. So I went there.

There is a reason why this project was unfinished. My mum had given me a gift of a cone of Jamieson and Smith 4ply from Shetland.  It is a dark oxblood heather and just lovely.  I thought I would try making a half hap shawl.  Hap shawls are the traditional everyday shawl of the Shetland Island women.  I looked at some images belonging to the Shetland Museum. I read about hap construction. It didn’t sound so hard…a bit of garter stitch, a bit of Old Shale lace and then a border.  So I just cast on, no plan, no real idea of how I was going to do this.

The first stage of knitting progressed smoothly particularly after I adopted the centre garter spine used in Kate Ray’s Multnohma  pattern.   I increased a stitch at each end and either side of the middle spine to create a garter stitch triangle.

It was the Old Shale lace pattern that did me in (pictured here in James Norbury, Traditional Knitting Patterns, 19673).  It was hubris for my cock-a-hoop cast on.  Like most lace knitting, Old Shale balances yarn overs and decreases to create a lacey pattern, in this case undulating lace ripples.  My challenge was to keep in pattern with all those yarn over whilst also increasing at each end and either side of the spine.  I had to keep the look of eyelets approaching the central spine as I created enough stitches over many rows to add another repeat to the pattern.  So I was constantly having to juggle the real yarn overs which actually functioned as increases in the pattern (balanced by decreases in a different section of the pattern repeat) with my ‘fake’ ones (neutralised by a knit 2 together straight after) which kept the look of the lace pattern.  It became a monster, a hydra in fact where each row conquered only yielded a more complex arrangement of pattern yarn overs and fake ones and increases….aaaaahh!

This is why lace is charted rather than intuited!

So I stopped. I put the shawl and yarn away in a dark bag and hung it on the back of the study door until 3 years later when I needed some needles.

But do you know what happens to cowardy custard knitters?  They get moths! Yes…by the time I looked into it that dark bag was a fun park of moth casings and eaten bits of yarn.

I decided to rip it all out.

Then I look again and saw only one moth hole in the actual shawl (which can be fixed to near invisible) and realised that despite all that dread about finishing this thing, it was almost finished anyway.  There were no more yarn over combinations to  puzzle over, just a border to knit.

I decided to finish it, block it and then assess if all the yarn over gymnastics had worked out.

So I looked at this excellent tutorial by Miriam Felton on adding a knitted border. I picked the gartern stitch edging pattern from the Harmony Guide Vol. 2, charted it and tried it.  It looked like a spider had gone crazy so I simplified the chart and got to it.

If you have never knitted on a border for a shawl, I can heartily recommend the experience.  You are knitting perpendicularly to the body of the shawl creating a super stretchy cast off to the whole thing.  The border is attached to the shawl edge one row at a time by knitting the last stitch of the border with the next stitch of the shawl edge.

This is my chart for the border. I added an extra stitch at the beginning for slipping on the right side and knitting with a stitch from the body of the shawl.

A few nights work saw the border finished. Then washed, blocked and repaired it.

It is done (more pics tomorrow)

Did I mention, that I just needed a needle?