First off, let me thank all of you (and Anne!) for your wonderful comments, suggestions, and help with my stole project. I spent a lot more time over the weekend swatching and thinking, thinking and swatching, calculating, figuring, wondering, vacillating. Finally, I decided to decide, and made the decision. My shawl is going to have all four lace motifs I showed you on Friday, plus the border, but they’re going to be arranged differently than I’d originally planned.

Karen and Brenda pointed out that the purl shell pattern that I had at the bottom of the large swatch seemed rather heavy. Anne added that usually the denser patterns (like that purl shell) are more often used around the shoulders, and the lighter, more open designs are on the outer edges.

Well, that’s lovely, but there goes my progression.

Hm. Okay. I can live with that.

I went back and looked at the swatches again.

Meanwhile, I’d been talking to Karen. She nicely pulled my swatch picture into Photoshop and tinkered with the image a bit. Thank you, Karen! She pulled the wave border all the way around, eliminated the purl shell pattern, and repeated the other shell pattern with the wave to make a larger “swatch.” Though I decided not to knit the shawl quite this way, it definitely gave me some ideas. Especially for the border. The thing she did there that I find totally cool is that she turned the waves around on one side, so they’re facing the other way. Where they meet in the middle is a lovely splash of yarn. Part of my fiddling this weekend included turning that wave chart around, and test knitting it. Oooh.

The small swatch on the left is my tiny sample of knitting the wave border in both directions at once. I’d thought for a while of just knitting the border along with the shawl, but the bi-directional thing—not to mention turning the corners—gets a little odd at the ends. That particular idea went out the window, but I’m glad I spent the time to turn the chart around. It’ll work just fine for the right side of the stole.

The upper swatch, with the suns, was me experimenting with Anne’s suggestion of adding a row of yarn overs and knit-two-togethers right before the suns. It was also useful in finding and fixing the errors I’d made in transposing the pattern from the book. Some of the symbols in the book aren’t all that clear, so re-charting it was necessary so that I wouldn’t drive myself crazy. Fixing the errors I’d made in the chart while doing that helped, too.

I did some calculations based on the width of my blocked swatches, and cast on yesterday afternoon for the real stole. I now have a couple full pattern repeats of the open and lacy sea foam motif. It’s not a lot, but it’s a good start.

Other knitting fronts

At some point over the weekend I actually had a little bit of time for blog reading. I saw that Mim installed a nifty new plug-in to her blog so that she can include Wikipedia searches easily in her posts. I had to check it out myself. It’s a simple little plug in called Wikisearch, so I installed it. Check this out. I type the word “wiki” then put the thing I want to search for in parentheses right after it, and voila! Like this: knitted lace.

Now if I just remember to use it next time I want to look something up, I’ll have it made.

I actually made some progress on Clapotis Friday night. We got a last min­ute invitation to share some baby back ribs with friends, so rushed right over. I took an extra 30 second to get ready. It was absolutely essential to take a project with me that I could work on in low light after dinner, as we often watch a movie after dinner with these friends. The ribs were awesome. If you haven’t tried Alton Brown’s recipe for baby back ribs yet, you are missing out. We’ve made these ourselves, but not for a while. We do, how­ever, always have a supply of the rub on hand, as it’s good on everything from scrambled eggs to chicken. Yum.

I also made a little progress, finally, on the first sleeve of my sweatshirt sweater. I was between stole swatches, and needed something to do while thinking. The mindless knitting of the sleeve was perfect. I only have a few more inches to go before that first sleeve is done.

Stitch pattern books

I was a bad girl about a week ago, and bought some more books (sheepish grin). But they’ll be useful! I got myself a copy of Mary Thomas’s Book of Knitting Patterns and the Big Book of Knitting Stitch Patterns. Both are wonderful. Both are chalk-full of ideas—you can see that I’ve already marked some pages in the Big Book—but the books couldn’t be more different from each other. The Big Book is a modern book stuffed full of full-color photos of swatches, written stitch instructions and clear charts.

Mary Thomas’s book, on the other hand, has all black and white illustra­tions, most of which are hand drawn, showing off its original publication date of 1943, and the fact that no computers were used in laying out her masterpiece (the publication industry has changed considerably with the invention of the desktop computer!). My edition is newer, but they kept everything inside the covers the same as the original publication. Though there are a lot of stitch patterns in Ms. Thomas’s book, there are also a lot of ideas in it. While I’ll spend a lot of time turning the pages of the Big Book and pulling patterns out of it without preamble, I’ll need to spend a lot of time with Ms. Thomas’s book, really reading it, in order to absorb all its information.

My pillows!

Rachel just sent me a photo of the lounge that my pillows ended up in. I think it looks fabulous. That green piping around the pillows did its job in pulling in all the elements, don’t you think? Woot!