Lerwick is Finished!

Blocking..........

Done Done Done ...................

Lerwick

By: Sharon Miller

Heirloom Knitting

Yarn: Wool/Silk from Colourmart

Worked on Size 1 U.S. 24" needle

The book is $43.00 plus shipping from Schoolhouse Press.
I will sell this book for $30.00, there are no marks in it, contact me if interested.

Lerwick

My last post was when I had finished the edging of the Lerwick shawl.

Since then I have worked the border (completed 4/16/09) and the center which I completed today; all that's left is to graft and block.

This was the most time consuming project I have done to date. It was tedious and awkward to me to work with such fine yarn (oh yeah right - that's why I ordered a cone of laceweight cashmere so I can torture myself some more) . I made more errors in this shawl than any other project I have made to date but there was no way I was going to frog since the rows contained approx. 1,000 stitches; I fixed any mistake as best I could and moved on.

Maybe fine weight lace knitting is just not my thing and I should add it to my list of knitting techniques that I don't enjoy working: felting, entrelac, intarsia for example.

Deborah (RogueKnit) finished her Lerwick - it's gorgeous.

Next post: Lerwick blocked.

Progress

After at least six weeks, I have finally finished the edging on the Lerwick shawl. Feels good to have made some progress.

The yarn is 2/20 or 2/30 (can't read the label) which means extremely fine and the stitch pattern is worked on both sides - those two factors really slowed me down, plus there were 128 repeats of the 16 row pattern (36,864 stitches) - no wonder it took so long.

The last step was to graft the two ends together. I wanted to graft it in pattern and knew that would be really confusing even though it was only 15 stitches. I decided to make a swatch in a heavier yarn with the row that was to be grafted knit with a contrasting color that I could follow when I did the actual graft:

After my sweet husband set up some lighting so that I could see what I was doing, I was ready to begin the operation (he said it looked like I was performing surgery):

I removed the provisional cast on and put those stitches on a second dpn, checked five times to make sure that I didn't have the length of edging twisted and was correctly matching up the ends, hitched up my glasses for optimal magnification and began..........

TADA!

The next process is to pick up stitches (1,200+) along the straight edge (only took three tries to get it right) and knit the mitred border which is about 100 rows long - this could take a while - so far the four rows that I have knit took about 2 hours per row.

On Sunday I went to a spin-in at Barb's (I don't spin but the nice fiber ladies let me bring my knitting). A couple hours of knitting, eating, chatting - before I knew it I was ready to knit the toe on the second sock of a pair I've been working on since the start of the year. Always glad to finish the second sock! The pattern is a 7-stitch twisted rib cable. The yarn is by Neighborhood Fiber Company (purchased at The Loopy Ewe):

I had a lot of fun designing and knitting this colorful modular scarf in Crystal Palace Mini-Mochi purchased at The Kirkwood Knittery. The pattern is being test knit and then it will be available on Ravelry and on my blog through Ravelry (you don't need to be a member of Ravelry to purchase a pattern). The scarf is knit in garter stitch trapezoids, there are no seams. One length is knit with the first skein and the second length is attached as it is knit with the second skein:

This yarn is a very loosely spun fingering weight wool. It's very soft and has a pretty halo (makes it hard to rip out) with long repeats of various colors.