Not Much Knitting, but Some Thinking of Knitting

It's a busy time of year, so I haven't gotten as much knitting time in as usual. I haven't been to the yarn shop, and I went on a mini-vacation over the weekend where I did more beach combing than knitting. Not a bad thing to do, of course!

I have knit a bit on my second mysterious Koi sock. I have new directions for the second one, so we'll see if this one comes out right! I have already received some lovely beaded stitch markers from the pattern designer as a thank you, so I do want to actually test the directions I helped with! It would be nice, huh?

I also got to the edging, finally, on my Andromeda shawl. Interestingly, it's the hardest part, and has a lot of symbols I have never seen before. Naturally, the rest of the shawl has written out instructions, but not the edging! (Unless I lost it when my printer got everything out of order due to not having a paper feed tray, which IS a possibility.) And I could not find a legend to explain some of the abbreviations (I figured out that one was K2tog in garter stitch and another was knit in front and back in garter stitch, but by trial and error). I had to figure out a few things and read a fairly complex chart, but persevered and now have half the edging done. I decided that the pattern is at least a "medium" in difficulty!

Because the shawl ends in points (see photo--sorry to steal the one off the pattern page, but you can't see it on mine yet 'cause it's not blocked and I sincerely doubt it will be that big when it IS blocked) you have to attach the yarn at various points, then bind off and reattach it. That leaves lots of little ends! Mostly I am proud that I got it all straightened out and arranged such that I think it will resemble the picture fairly closely, only much more colorful and with much thinner yarn.

One thing that helped, once I realized I'd have to be changing which end of the needle I'd be working on, was to put the second half of the shawl on a holder while I worked the first half of the edging. That made it a little easier to manipulate the stitches.

Speaking of Thinking, and Shawls...An Edging Question

One of the readers of this blog (which I originally typed as "blob"), landofmisfitknits, asked me on Ravelry for some ideas for other edgings to try out on Dianna, because she'd like to make one like mine, but doesn't have access to a copy of the Knitting on the Edge book. I suggested that her library might have the Barbara Walker treasury series or the Harmony Guides, and I found a website with links to knitted lace edgings. Hey I should share it with you so, go here to see if any of them are any good--I was working so I didn't check. But, if any of you have any ideas for online resources or other books she might check into, please share! I know that my books on Shetland lace and other shawl books have a few, too. That Heirloom Knitting book from England is wonderful, but expensive and takes a while to show up. What are your favorite edging sources?

I did notice that there are a LOT of pages on the Web about how to attach a knitted-on edging, so if you decide you want to do that to a shawl like mine, you will be able to find plenty of help by just searching for the right terms ("knitted edging" should do it). Remember, you can either attach an edging to live stitches OR directly to an edge--you just have to try to get the right number of rows so that you don't pucker the knitting or make a ruffle. Luckily, blocking can be quite forgiving!

OK, as rambly and imprecise as this is, you'd never peg me for an editor or technical writer, but let's just call this a creative writing exercise and forgive me. I'll try to write a bit more often in the next week or two--I think work may be less busy, but I have evening engagements for many, many days in a row now!

PS: If any of my old Bluebonnet friends are reading, I miss you and hope you keep in touch while I am not over there much!