Vested Interest and Blocking "Fun"

For the past couple of days I have faithfully been adding to the Lady Jane vest. She's moving right along!

This is my current progress. I got to the part where you join it and knit circularly, and make a really lovely cable pattern in the center front. It's lots of fun and a lot more interesting than just repeating the same pattern over and over. I am glad the project can be interesting, too, because the yarn for the second one showed up yesterday. It is quite...yellow. You'll see it in the next blog entry.


This is a close-up of the central motif. Isn't that a nice knot? It repeats again starting with my next row, then the pieces of the knot start moving over as the neckline happens. The armholes start as soon as they knot is done, too, so no more nice circular knitting after that!
Why, what is this lovely thing on top of a very flowery bedspread? It's the Desert Lilac Aeolian shawl blocking! Ah, what an adventure I had doing that! Washing it was easy, and rolling it in a towel was fine, but the pinning...well.

...let's take a break to look at the edging transition and agave patterns, why don't we? Ahh.

And here we have a nice shot of all the patterns. They do look a little odd with all those stripes and flowers under them, but the king-sized bed was the only place it could go!

So, pinning. I used blocking wires at the top, curving them as the shawl wanted to curve, and at the bottom, catching as many edges as I could. I seem to have misplaced a couple of wires, so I had to pin some of the edge points. Then, as I was painstakingly pinning 5 points on each edge motif, I ran out of pins. EEK! I'd actually bought a set of blocking pins from KnitPicks along with the (much too small and not used) blocking mats. Thank goodness for that! As it is, I used all my two boxes of t-pins, the blocking pins, some small t-pins I found at the bottom of a drawer, and then, because I could not locate the pins with nice colored balls on top of them that I just saw last week, I had to use things you are supposed to use in making earrings on the last few points.

Ahh, there she is in all her glory.

By the time I finished finding and placing all the pins, the shawl was completely dry. So I misted it with water. I just had to re-mist it, since I saw I hadn't balanced the points I put on the bottom of it well enough. I hope it dries in time to take to the yarn shop this afternoon!

I am pleased with how the body of the shawl looks now that it is blocked. All the lumps and weird places smoothed out nicely. Using the shinier beads instead of nupps looks fine to me (and my opinion counts the most on this!). The edging is simply hard to do. Everyone on the Ravelry group says they have trouble with that part, so I don't feel alone.

I haven't had any work this week, which is not great, but at least leaves me a bit of knitting time.