Enough! I cried, then heeded myself not.

As I mentioned in my previous post, 2015 was the Year of the Shawl. I had joined the “12 Shawls Forever” group on Ravelry and been inspired to produce at least a dozen wraps of one sort or another to qualify for the various draws (I won a pattern one month, so chose another shawl, of course) and to see if I could actually do it. When I’d bound off and blocked my last shawl for the year, I breathed a sigh of relief and said, “That’s it. No more shawls, at least for a little bit.”

The first part of January was spent finishing a pair of gloves for the husband which I had fully intended to be a Christmas present but somehow missed the deadline. His doctor had told him to wear thin, woollen gloves to bed to keep his hands warm at night so that his joints would be more supple in the morning. We are getting to that age, you know. I have had my fair share of pain with knobby bits on the first joint of my right index finger. I used a 3-ply 100% merino from Sweet Paprika for the gloves, whimsically named Messa di voce, which works quite well in a musical family, in a pattern of my own devising (i.e. winging it). They turned out quite well for something I never intended the public to see (although I post it here for the public to see) and they fit my husband’s sizable hands quite adequately. They are, needless to say, very warm.

I also have a pair of socks on needles which I started the day after I bound off the gloves, and they will be travelling with me to Panama (A man! A plan! A canal!) as holiday knitting (along with more sock yarn to start another pair when these are finished, which they will be before we leave to come home). Why did I not finish the socks? I started them almost six weeks ago. That’s inexcusable!

Okay, I’ll tell you. I made another shawl. The “Envision” group on Ravelry hosted an international shawl exchange. In order to participate, one had to fill out a rather detailed questionnaire to determine likes, dislikes, allergies, and various other parameters pertaining to knitted shawls. The organizer (and what a job this must have been!) then matched up partners in groups of four so that we knit for the person in front of us and received from the person behind us. My recipient is a lovely woman from New Brunswick who winters in Florida and, while I had specified that I did not want to send a package out of the country, I got matched up with her anyway. It all turned out fine in the end, just so you know.

We chatted through Ravelry messages to come up with a shawl-yarn combination and I suggested that I knit Madli’s Shawl from Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia in a 100% silk I had languishing in my stash. She agreed. I cast on immediately after New Year’s thinking I would have lots of time to knit this in a leisurely fashion, as the end date for the exchange is March 15.

Madli’s Shawl is a lace stole of the typical Estonian style: There are two edge pieces, one of which is knit and left on a needle, and the other is the foundation for the rest of the piece. When it is time, the two are grafted together to make a seamless whole. I’ve done this with a number of Estonian scarves now and think it is a very clever construction. A friend of mine had recently made the Oroya Shawl from Yarn Crush’s August box and had leftover beads in a blue-green hue which matched my silk perfectly.

I made the second edge first and left it on a straight needle. Since the beading was so tedious, I decided only to add them to the edges, which was plenty. They lent a subtle sparkle.

Then I knit the second edge and kept going with the main pattern. It’s a pretty easily-memorized design: six knit rows of symmetrical lace festooned with nupps, purled on each wrong side. The knitting was actually very easy and went more quickly than I had planned. It did, however, keep me from working on those socks.

I must explain that it was not a full ball of yarn I had started with. A couple of years ago I had made a necklace using three grams of this silk, and I feared I would run out. Luckily, my friend Bonnie had an extra ball she had obtained from the same supplier around the same time, and came to the rescue right at the end when I was halfway through a repeat and out of thread. As it turned out, I probably could have eschewed that last repeat altogether as the stole came out quite long enough when blocked. Bonnie’s yarn was slightly paler than my own. If I hadn’t said that, you wouldn’t notice it. But since I did....

Here’s the finished stole all nicely pinned out on my daughter’s bed.

And here she is, in -20°C temperatures, in sharp contrast to the crisp snow all around.

It took just over five weeks to finish. If I had not added the beads, it would have taken less time. The beads were problematic: extremely tiny (size 10 or smaller) with unevenly-shaped holes, inconsistent in size and shape, and one even had a sharp edge that sawed through my yarn at one point and I had to do a quick repair job. Pulling them over the beading wire caused many to break, and I was a very happy knitter when I was done with them. In spite of all the issues I had with them, they were the perfect beads for this yarn.

I sent it off by courier on February 17 with a pretty card and a packet of flavoured tea to my new friend in Florida and it arrived the next day. She was thrilled, which made me very, very happy.

I used my powers for good!