This week I finished yet another baby sweater and matching hat - the sweater had been languishing unseamed and without buttons in my to-do pile for months. Now, with most of the half-finished projects cleared out of the basket, I was ready to tackle the next beast - making a Shetland lace shawl for the eventual baptism of the bun in my oven this fall.
I looked through several pattern books before I found the right piece; here are the books I consulted, which, though they didn't contain the winning shawl, did have lots of helpful advice:
- Sharon Miller, Heirloom Knitting
- Meg Swanson, A Gathering of Lace
- Martha Waterman, Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls
There are plenty of other books out there containing sample lace stitch patterns, but since this is my first project I wanted toa full pattern with lots of guidance. Maybe after this one I'll be brave enough to try putting together my own mix of patterns.
So the Sheelagh shawl I picked is from the now out-of-print and hard-to-find Gladys Amedro's Shetland Lace. The book contains both shawl patterns and basic stitch patterns, all written in the traditional Shetland knitting abbreviations (e.g., T = k2tog or ssk, c = YO). I prefer to work from charts, so I not only had to translate the Scottish symbols into English/American, I also had to plot everything onto charts. It's not the most user-friendly book in the world, but I actually enjoy charting because it forces me to read a pattern all the way through before starting and helps me puzzle through the structure of a new pattern better than if I just started knitting from a chart someone else made. I made all my charts in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which I'll post here if I can figure out how to do it.
One tricky part of that charting project was that Shetlanders apparently use the symbol T for both k2tog and ssk decreases, leaving it to the expert knitter to figure out which way the stitches should slant. I had to refer to a few other books to learn what to do for the Print o' the Wave pattern.
I ordered a bag (ten 25g balls) of Jamieson's Cobweb Shetland 1-ply wool, undyed cream color, from Schoolhouse Press. I had never seen this type of yarn before in any local stores and was surprised by just how thin it really is - it is like knitting with heavy sewing thread. It appears to have been slightly starched before being wound into balls, because it feels a bit stiff - this is a great benefit because it keeps the knitting from collapsing into a mass of fluff, and helps you feel like you're holding something more substantial than a thin thread. Working with it does take some getting used to, because you must hold the knitting loosely.
So, with all that preparation done, I finally cast on for the Sheelagh Shawl this week. The pattern requires that you first knit a loooooooong strip of border, and then pick up stitches to knit the shawl's innards in the round. The pattern calls for a basic pointy edge plus a repeat of Print o' the Wave, so it works out to about 34-37 sts per row. A full repeat gives four waves plus three pointy edges, 48 rows total. And I have to do 40 of those! So far I have, um, two repeats done. Let's see - baby is due end of July, and I have 126 days to go before he arrives. If I average a repeat per day, that will take 40 days, then I still have to do the monstrously huge center of the shawl. Perhaps I need to pick up my speed and try to get two repeats done per day. I think I'll set a goal of being done with the border by the end of April; that will give me May, June, and July to finish the rest of it. Now I just have to figure out how to block this thing when it's done - should I get my husband to make me a frame like this?
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