Ever since I bought Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia, I have been fascinated by the Crown Prince Square Shawl pattern. So many nupps! As I mentioned in a prior post, nupps haven’t always been an easy part of my knitting technique repertoire. I’ve knit an awful lot of them, though, even before I attempted this particular pièce de résistance. But I needed a reason to make this shawl, and one serendipitously presented itself. I knit an afghan for one niece because I liked the pattern and thought that I should do the same thing again. I determined to make this bride a tablecloth from the Crown Prince Square Shawl pattern.
Certain modifications were of course necessary. It had to be a close fabric without much give, so I chose KnitPicks Curio crochet cotton in natural, and went down from the specified 3.5mm to 3mm needles. There was a pretty steep learning curve as I went along.
The pattern itself is not really difficult. My mother used to say that if you could read and follow directions, you could do anything. Luckily, I am one of those people. Knitting nupps with cotton yarn was not as difficult as others had led me to believe, lacking stretch as it does. Instead, the smaller needles made it much easier. Here’s an example:
The nupps make the outline of the Crown Prince motif, which is a six-pointed star/snowflake. Here’s the bottom bit held down by chessmen:
I began this adventure on the penultimate day of March and had it finished by the end of April. There was a stretch in there when my husband and I went to Florida to bring his parents home from their half-yearly sojourn in the sunshine state. I flew home with his mother and had a lot of time to knit while we waited for her husband and son to arrive with the car. Here’s the bound-off body:
It wasn’t finished yet, though. The pattern included a chart for an edging to be sewn on after. Two were to be knit separately, then attached in a very complicated way so that the corners lay flat. I threw up my hands in exasperation and declared I would make mitred corners, like any good carpenter.
Thus ensued much doing of math to figure out the appropriate number of stitches to cast on. I got one strip finished before realizing that it was enormous. A bit of recalculation got me a better size. The knitting of the strips didn’t really take that long. I could knock one off in a day if I dedicated myself to it. But I was ambivalent about sewing them onto the body of the tablecloth. They stayed in my knitting bag for over a month before I finally steam blocked them to uncurl the upper edges and then pinned them all around. In order to make it less tedious, I brought it to knitting group and stitched while my friends knitted. Even that took two sessions because I couldn’t bring myself to work on it when I got home.
It is finally finished. I washed and blocked it, liberally dosing it with spray starch. The result is magnificent. See for yourself.
I sincerely hope my niece and her husband-to-be like it. It was an enormous amount of work and I may never make another.
