Knitting Battlemaidens

Gladys Amedro's Sheelagh Shawl

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?

More (what else) baby sweaters

M,

Three more baby sweaters to report.  The first is a Dale of Norway cabled sweater (like the one I made for some friends here) in a rustic tweed wool.  I found some lovely deer antler buttons that work well with it.  I think I'm keeping this one, in case the bun in my oven turns out to be a boy.

The next is a mini version of the Tulip Cardigan I made for your daughter.  I used alternating stripes of blue and green, and found a cute hook clasp for the neck instead of I-cord ties. 

The third sweater is actually a matching set - I have two former co-workers who are both expecting girls in the coming months (the same two who had boys at the same time and received these - their wives must be secretly coordinating the timing and genders of all this babymaking).  I wanted to make sweaters that would work in spring and summer weather, so I picked a recipe for a yoked lace sweater from Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitter's Almanac.  I decided to use the handdyed handspun yarn you gave me for my birthday this year, since you had given me about 6 oz and EZ's sweater recipe called for 3 oz of a Shetland or baby-weight wool.  I made a  modification to EZ's recipe ("Baby Sweater on Two Needles, Practically Seamless") because it originally called for knitting the sleeves flat and seaming them, but I knit them in the round and made the sweater truly seamless.  It's a cute pattern, and you can crank out a lovely baby gift in a few hours with a small amount of yarn.  I'm definitely keeping it on my short list for when I'm desperate for a gift idea.  I still haven't figured out what to do for a clasp at the neck - I omitted the buttonholes and figured I'd look for delicate silver hooks like the one I used on the mini-Tulip.

Next on my list, after EZ sweater No. 2 is done this afternoon, is to start on a long-term project. I ordered a large batch of Jamieson & Smith cobweb wool and plan to start Gladys Amedro's Sheelagh Shawl to use during the bump's eventual baptism this fall.  The pattern is in her out-of-print Shetland Lace book, which I scored at a used book store a while back.

S