July's project is a circular lace shawl, which Ms. Zimmermann bills as a great travel project. She's right too: knit on circular needles from the inside out, the shawl makes a pouch as you knit it that is great for holding the yarn and pattern when you take it places. I purchased some lace-weight wool yarn in a sand color for the shawl.
 |
| Pi Shawl |
Although she calls it just a circular shawl, the pattern is widely known as the Pi Shawl because it loosely uses geometry in its increase pattern. Basically the pattern has you double your stitches, then knit a number of rows to equal 1/6 (or 1/2π) of the number of stitches. It roughly uses the formula for the circumference of a circle related to its radius. It's not perfect: pi obviously doesn't equal 3, the height of a stitch is not exactly the width of a stitch, and it means that the earlier rows after an increase are not proportionate; but happily with knitting, once it's washed and blocked these imperfections disappear. The simple increase pattern and large sections of equal rows allow a lot of room for variation and personalization. Any lace pattern can be inserted into each of the sections, and Ms. Zimmermann encourages experimentation. She does give her own simple patterns to insert, however, and I mostly followed the instructions she gave, except for the border.
 |
| Lace Border |
For the border, Ms. Zimmermann expands upon a technique we learned in February for knitting a sideways border. This time, instead of simple garter stitch, she suggests using a lace pattern, but still followed the same technique of joining the border to the main piece by casting on directly from the last row, and knitting one stitch from the main piece together with the last stitch of every other row of the border pattern. Instead of the loop edging that Ms. Zimmermann gives in the book, I found a lace edging pattern that I thought complemented the lace patterns in the rest of the shawl and used that.
This project was a favorite with my cat Columbine, and not particularly in a good way. She very stereotypically loves to play with yarn, and frequently steals my projects and takes them to her lair under the couch. While I certainly don't encourage this behavior, usually her playing with a project doesn't harm the work too much. But as I soon learned, in the case of fine lace yarn, sharp kitty teeth, even only for a second, can be disastrous. I was about halfway done the project when I noticed four growing holes in the earlier part of the shawl. Not seeing how I could repair the damage, I sadly unraveled the whole project and started over, this time carefully guarding my project, by making sure to seal it in a bag before walking away from it.
 |
| First bag, lots of teeth marks |
 |
Second bag, fewer teeth marks,
but enough to damage my work |
Unfortunately, having had a taste for lace yarn, Columbine was determined to get to my project, and the sealed bag was just an added challenge. She put tons of tiny teeth holes in the bag, eventually causing the bag to get some larger holes. So I added a second sealable bag, enshrining my work twice every time I put it aside. And yet, just as I was about two thirds of the way done, I noticed two holes that were not part of the lace pattern. This time, I caught it before they were too big, and the placement of the holes was luckily not over a lacy area, so I was able to (inexpertly) fix it instead of starting over. After that, I purchased a plastic box to keep my work in when I'm not working on it. A box, I might add, my cat is desperately trying to figure out how to open.
 |
| Inexpert mending |
Aside from the lessons learned about keeping my projects away from my cats, there was not a whole lot to take away from this chapter. I've knit lace patterns before, so that was not new to me. I can see the applications for the pi formula of increases, but as I indicated above, it's not perfect, and I'll probably explore other techniques before returning to this one. The sideways border we already did, and though the lace application is new, I had already made the leap to that as a possibility. But I do have a lovely new shawl in a neutral color to add to my wardrobe, so despite the lack of new techniques, I'd call this month's project a success.
 |
| Center of shawl |
 |
| Outer edge |
Posts
