Stint O' The Wave

It's over! I finished the Print O' The Wave Stole yesterday. I soaked it and put it on the blocking wires yesterday afternoon, and went in to take a look this morning, after leaving it under the ceiling fan all night. There it was, in all its lovely laciness. I'm so happy!

Despite the mid-project disaster, this was a really fun pattern. In fact, it only has two charts to follow and neither of them is overly complicated as long as your are willing to embrace the K3tog. Mostly, it's a marathon. And like, most garments with a knitted on border, when you have the main part finished you're really only half way there.

For me, once the external instructions get incorporated into internal rules of knitting grammar (the K3tog stitches always look like this, every other odd-numbered row has a yarnover 3 stitches from the beginning of the row, etc.) the whole process seems to flow. As I described to a friend yesterday, it's like anything you learn by rote; what seemed so foreign at first almost becomes second nature. Although I kept the sheet with the edging pattern on it handy for the past few weeks, I rarely consulted it. However, it can be hard to get back into the flow state when you get interrrupted. For instance, I don't recommend watching intense TV shows while knitting this pattern. I'm talking to you, Breaking Bad. I'm convinced watching this show dragged out the timeline on this stole significantly.

As I've mentioned before, the hard thing for me about knitting lace is waiting for the payoff, which doesn't happen until the blocking. Until then, it all looks like a wrinkly mess. And I had trouble with the blocking. I really wanted to make it fit the dimensions in the pattern -- 80" x 25". But when I tried to stretch it to these dimensions, my blocking wires started bending and pins started popping out of place. I'm lucky I didn't break any of the stitches. The pattern calls for blocking it "aggressively," but I think I was bordering on abusive. I backed down to 72" x 22", which, considering I had knit on size 3 needles instead of the recommended size 4, seems about right.

I didn't make this with anyone in mind, so I'm unsure of its fate. I mostly just wanted to get some more practice with lace and to burn through some lace yarn that I'd gotten at a swap. So, mission accomplished. I can recommend this to anyone wanting to attempt a lace project involving grafting and knitted-on edging.

My next project will not be aqua, blue-green or turquoise, will not take two months to knit, and will be done on gigantic needles.