Shipwreck Shawl Progress

[liralen]

In honor of aruarian_dancer's birthday, since I'm making this for her, I thought I'd show progress pics. :-)

I am lazy.

I had no desire to block the center simply to make photos of it, so, instead, I moved the shawl to a 40 inch circular needle so that it could be stretched out a little so that people could see it look like something more than just a hair net. *laughs* If you click on it, the full size photo will show more detail, but didn't want to overwhelm to start.

I'm done with the first two lace patterns and starting into the third one, which is the last 'real' pattern, in my mind. As the rest of it is just (yo, k2tog) which is going to be an interesting set of doldrums in a way.

I am amused to go knitting around and go, oh huh... added a yo in the wrong place, drop it. Huh, that's wrong, oh, just pick this up and it'll work. Or getting to the line that reads (k144, M1) twice, and laughing at the number. I mean, obviously they just needed two stitches to make the patterns even so just put one on each side. Or getting through 29 repeats of a 10 stitch pattern and finding two extra stitches and shrugging and just decreasing two on the last two repeats, because it's Not A Big Deal...

So I'm realizing in a lot of ways, that my experience with lace really helps out as I'm just going along and fixing things as I knit rather than worrying about any of it. It's good to know what I can fudge without actually affecting the outcome.

This picture is of the lace patterns, stretched out a little to show them off better, they'll be good and stretched when I block the center bit. The interesting thing with this pattern is that the central circle is in US 4's, but as soon as it gets to the netting section it expands, significantly to US 8's and then through a steady sequence of 9's, 10's, and 10.5's... so it should be much faster than the central, solid section. In a way, getting the middle circle done will be about the halfway point.

And I'm making pretty good progress with that, especially since the yarn is such fun to work with. I also bought the metal Knitpicks interchangeable circular tips as they were cheaper than getting a whole new circular needle. And they're good and fast. I also own Audi Turbos from years ago, but I prefer these, as I can just change the size of the tips when it comes time to go up a few sizes.

And finally a real close up to show off some of the sheen of the yarn itself. I've already tested my beads in boiling water, and I think this is dyed lightly enough that I'm going to be able to overdye with the blues and greens easily. But the color of this is so nice just as it is. *laughs*

It really is a little hard, as all silk lends both the sheen, silky hand feel, and a better definition of the stitches than wool can give as well as little hardness to the texture of the finished item. So it should still have the pebbly feel to it that the original had in the description of the pattern.

I really am enjoying this as a knit and am pretty happy with the amount of progress I've made so far.

A cool thing about this pattern is that it takes advantage of the geometric reality of circles, that since the circumference is in direct proportion to the radius, every time one doubles the width of the overall circle, one simply doubles the number of stitches around the circumference. *grins* c=2pir

I love math in practice...