This project has been quite some time in the making! I bought the yarn back in early March – a St. Patrick’s Day sale on green yarns timed with a bit of extra spending money encouraged me to impulsively throw a single skein of the first fingering-weight yarn I’ve bought for myself into the cart along with the workhorse worsted weight I was buying for other projects. It looked so pretty, and I’d only just started my love affair with lace. Buying the yarn, of course, led to a long search for the perfect pattern to knit it with, which eventually led me to the designer Nim Teasdale, found here on Ravelry and here on WordPress. She makes some truly amazing adjustable shawls, and I’ve been very pleased with the deceptive ease of the pattern Sea Songs. Finally, I decided to wait to actually start the project until my birthday-present needles arrived… and with life being life, of course, that meant I didn’t actually cast on the shawl I’ve named Frog Pond Melody (after the yarn’s colorway, Tadpole) until early June.
I haven’t had to learn too many new things for this shawl. All of the lace stitches were familiar to me, although the technique for using double yarn-overs to make an extra-large eyelet was surprising and a bit of finicky fun to manage. The cast-on was also new to me, but I like the way the garter tab cast on helps fill the little “gap” space some of my other lace shawls have had at the cast-on point. Next time I make a shawl, I’ll have to record the cast-on process for you here!
A progress shot from yesterday, July 27, during our very sacred Laundromat Knitting Time.
I’ve also really enjoyed the process of personalizing the “knit as you like it” lace charts. I decided to make the shawl be allover lace, eschewing the optional plain section at the neck of the shawl. I also chose to break up the seaweed lace as thoroughly as possible, taking the optional extra rows to make the long chains of lace wave back and forth across the shawl to the max. Yesterday, I just finished my first repeat of the fishtail lace chart that is the last chart left before bind-off… and I have a lot more yarn left than I was expecting! So this might be a very fishy frog pond indeed.
I hope everyone else’s works in progress are going well, whether they be knitting, another craft, or anything else! Have a good Wednesday, and you’ll hear from us again soon.
-Kit