Too many shawls

A couple of weeks ago I finally folded and put away the shawls that have been lying on my ironing board. It necessitated emptying a bottom drawer in my dresser, getting rid of things that have accumulated there over time, folding and putting the various wraps and stoles I possess neatly away. The drawer is full. There are shawls I have knitted, a shawl I crocheted, two near-identical white lace shawls (one I bought, one my mother-in-law gave me), silk wraps I purchased from Burmese fundraisers, pashminas bought at the Montreal bus station and two gorgeous stoles bought in New York from the Metropolitan Museum on separate occasions (one painted silk, one a pashmina). There is even a black satin stole from a Montreal airport store. I have probably missed a few. The point is, I have way too many shawls. I can’t wear them all, and yet I keep knitting them. The most recently completed FO of this genre was undertaken for a MKAL on Ravelry: Rapt for the Holidays (Holiday MKAL 2014) by Heather Anderson.

I’ve been trying to figure out what the appeal of MKALs is. I haven’t yet, so that’ll be a discussion for a future time. In the meanwhile, I should talk about the shawl that is now in a zip-lock plastic bag awaiting a decision on its fate. I had bought a skein of Marine Silk-Lace from Blue Moon Fiber Arts at the Toronto Knitters Frolic last spring which was the right weight (lace and 100 gm) for the undertaking. I went to a local jewelry supply store and purchased way too many beads. I was prepared!

Heather leaked the clues one chart at a time. First the beginning of a semi-circle following Elizabeth Zimmerman’s π formula in stockinette; then a chart of snowflakes, then a chart of lace candy canes. Aware that not everyone would want to make a garment too obviously reminiscent of Christmas, she included an alternate second chart which more people chose to knit, even though it was untested. I am included in that group. Then there was another chart of snowflakes, followed by a chart of wreaths, a final sprinkling of snowflakes, and a row of fir trees. People posted photos of their FOs before I was even close to the last bit, and I determined that the trees looked a little squat; so I added another set of branches. There was a beaded eyelet edging, and a choice of blocking it with points or not. I chose points. Here is my FO with the pins.

After I photographed it, I repinned the edge to redistribute the points. I’m much happier with the finished result.

Now. What do I do with it?

When love hurts.

I love to knit. You who read this probably love to knit. Why else would you read a knitting blog? But sometimes the things we love most can be bad for us. They say that if you are suffering from gastric distress or an allergic reaction or something along those lines to look to your favourite food for the culprit. This is so often the case. My brother was diagnosed with lactose intolerance. Milk was his favourite food. My daughter loves eggplant but some day it might actually kill her. Some people who love bread and other bakery products end up being diagnosed with celiac disease or wheat allergies. They have to make dietary sacrifices to maintain their good health.

I have no such issues. Well, not exactly true that, since I am also, like my daughter, allergic to eggplant. However, unlike her, I despise it, so avoiding it is not an issue. What I do like to do is knit, and presently I am experiencing pain in my left elbow which I have self-diagnosed as tendonitis caused by indulging in my preferred activity. I have one project in particular to blame for this condition, a shawl I volunteered to test knit.

I saw the call for knitters in The Testing Pool on Ravelry and liked the photograph of the designer’s FO. It’s a crescent shawl, extremely lacy with beads strategically placed, and I was sucked in like a paper boat in a whirlpool. I soon found out that one of my knitting buddies had also signed up for the test, so we had a lot of notes to compare as we went along. The designer had left the pattern extremely open ended, allowing for lace right from the get-go, or for varying depths of stockinette stitch before embarking on the lace. There was also no stipulation for the number of repeats of the charted pattern; again that was left up to preference. The lace edging was easy to lengthen as desired, being only two rows that repeated until one felt it was time to bind off. I’m much happier with specific directions, especially in a test knit, but I embarked willingly enough on this project. For yarn I cast on with Manos del Uruguay lace in a lovely variegated blue and used No. 8 clear beads with silver centres.

It did not take me long to find issues with the pattern. There were the usual typos one discovers, but my main problems were with the lace charts and I took some issue with the designer because she was not only slow to understand my notes, but also defensive. As I may have mentioned in this blog at some other time, patterns are all about the completed FO. The instructions must be clear and easy enough for the stupidest of people to understand. The best patterns are ones which tell you exactly what to do without a lot of written-out explanations. We don’t want to read; we want to knit!

If I may digress for a moment, those same directions were given to me when I was learning choral conducting. The conductor must know the music well and be able to relay to the choir (or orchestra or band) what he wants through hand gestures only. If he has to explain it, then you know that he’s not a very good conductor. The musicians/singers don’t need to know any of the philosophy or background of the piece; they just need to have a good  director directing them and a well-written score. The choir/orchestra/band has often been compared to the conductor’s instrument, in the same way that the violin is an instrument. You don’t tell your violin what you want it to do; you just play it. The same thing stands for the conductor. He must play his instrument and do it without it being concerned about anything but what he has them do.

So, back to the knitting: I cast on, knit the 36 or so rows required for the depth of stockinette I was aiming for, then started the lace chart. The designer had provided both charts and directions. The latter were clearly written and laid out in the order of tasks performed. The charts were another story. There were four of them: a) the optional stockinette section; b) main lace repeats; c) transition lace section; and d) edging. The first problem was super evident: she had placed them on the page with the first chart at the bottom and the last chart at the top so that they lined up top of one to bottom of next. Even as I type this I am still amazed at the stupidity of this arrangement. As I told the designer, we read patterns from the top of the page down; especially if we are using a computer or tablet where we must scroll to the next page. If you turn the page and start looking for Chart 1 and instead see Chart 4 at the top, you are immediately confused. I explained to her that I understood her aesthetic reason for placing the charts as she had, but a pattern is not a work of art; the finished knitted garment is the ultimate goal. One must make sacrifices at times.

The next issue—which actually caused me some real grief—was the chart for the edging. She did not show the WS rows in it, but had illustrated three RS rows. Her brief description called it a two-row chart to be repeated ad libitum with a knitted bind-off on the WS. I saw three rows, the first one labelled with a 1, and the others left unnumbered. The first row showed the edge increases, the other two did not. So I knit my first RS row according to the chart, then knit the identical thing for the WS without the edge increases. When I got to the end I thought to myself, “This looks terrible,” and read her written instructions for the edging. They made perfect sense. The chart was horribly wrong. I had to tink that entire row, and then purl a proper WS (with edge increases) before I could continue. When I brought this up to the designer, she simply couldn’t comprehend what was not to understand. She even asked me if the chart was understandable once I read the instructions, and I said, no, the instructions pointed out how glaringly wrong the chart was. My friend got in the act and helped me out, but it took a lot of correspondence in the thread before she realized that she should remove the two bad rows from the chart and reword the label.

The final problem was the knitted bind-off. I used a 8-mm needle for it and it was still too tight to block out points in the finished shawl. The designer should have specified a Russian or other lace bind-off. Since it was a test, I completed it as instructed. If it had not been a test, I would definitely have used a different bind-off.

Nonetheless, the FO is very pretty. I was not all that keen on her method of shaping the lace, but it was still effective and I like the beads. Here it is draped over the armchair in my living room:

I got one of my knitting group ladies to model it (and another to photograph it with her phone since I’d forgotten my camera) and it looks so nice on her, that I think I will gift it to her this upcoming holiday season.

I will never test for this designer again. It simply wasn’t fun and I believe I was tense the whole time, thus causing my elbow to develop tendonitis. But I’m still knitting. There will be more updates on FOs shortly.