What’s Going on Here?

I’ve lost about 9 days in a furious little, highly frustrating, energy draining, distracting, AAARRRHHH!!! health/life tangle that’s left me with a lot of aggravation, complications, and pointless scrambling about.  I could go into all the gory details but that’s not what this blog is about.  It was all just stupid on so many levels and all up in my face and in my way, and keeping me from doing what I want to be doing, which right now (and not surprisingly) is being quiet, calm, cocooned and knitting something.   Today is the first day I’ve been able to be where I want to be and just chill for a while.

So I was playing around with the cable edged shawl pattern and thought I saw something there I wanted to go after.  I was working it according to pattern, and thought it was going in a way I wanted to go, but, no.   I picked it up again today and, no.  Just, no.  Frogged it all out.  &*%$*#!  But I think I see what’s going on and why I don’t like the bits I don’t like, and how I can push the pattern closer to what I want.

The yarn weight works, but I’m going with a US9 (5.5 mm) needle instead of the US10 (6.0 mm) because I don’t want so lacy.   And the two stitch garter border for the top edge of the body of the shawl is too thin to my eye, and a 4-row garter tab to get 6 stitches is too deep and I didn’t like how that bit lay.  A 3-stitch border looks better to me, with a 3-stitch cast on and a 3-row garter tab to get 9 stitches.

The increase row for the shawl body adds 2 stitches a row using yarn overs.  I get that, and I see how it works.   However,  in the original pattern, you start the shawl body from a tab base of 6 stitches, which is an even number, and 9 isn’t, so if I start from a tab base of 9 stitches, I’ve got to sneakily either get rid of one stitch somewhere, somehow, or else add a stitch in somewhere, somehow to even things out so I’ll come out with the right number of working stitches (260) along the bottom edge of the shawl body so the edging pattern repeats will come out even.  So, in the pattern I’m writing to keep track of what I’m doing, I’ve got a step:  “Repeat row 2 until 260 stitches total.  In order to achieve this stitch count, at some random point in the shawl body work a single k2tog and mark it with a stitch marker so you’ll know you’ve done it.”  So there’s that.

My garter stitch lace shawl is coming along.  I’m liking the proportions of the increase.  I’m on my third pattern repeat for the edging.  Sticky notes work OK, but the stickum wears off the note when you have a pattern with a lot of repeats, like this one has.   I just surrendered to reality and got a typist stand for the pattern.  It is going to make doing this shawl so much easier, but it will also make knitting from any printed pattern easier, especially one with edging repeats, like the cable edged shawl will have.  I’m disciplining myself to do a whole pattern repeat at a sitting and to put my lifelines in at the end of each pattern repeat.   Dental floss.  Who knew?