I’ve always been inspired by the simple elegance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work—this window is from the Dana-Thomas house. I have some Silk Lace yarn from Claudia Hand Paints that’s been calling to me since it arrived at the end of January. The 100% silk lace weight yarn, combined with the delicate elegance of Claudia’s dye job, needs to be a simple knit, so the true beauty of the yarn can shine through. I found some lovely lozenge motifs, and started tinkering…

The lower part of the green swatch is knit almost exactly the way I found it. Almost. I changed it so that all yarn overs and knit two togethers are on the right side. I did the same thing with the smaller motif on top of the swatch. This swatch worked well enough that I found I needed to see how the stitches looked in silk, so I wound up the hank and dug in.

The gold swatch shows further modifications—I really liked those central flowers, but they begged to be spread out a bit so they could be seen properly, and so they’d match the smaller motif.

As I knit along, I became more and more dissatisfied with the flowers in the center of the lozenges. They’re too fussy. So I changed the charts. Again. You can see in this repeat at the top that the flowers are gone. They’ve been replaced with smaller lozenges.

I still didn’t like it, especially before blocking.

For a while I thought maybe it was a case of the yarn not working well with the stitch.

It was when I was taking pictures of the blocked swatches this morning that it dawned on me. The lozenges need to be simpler still. All the stuff inside the lozenges needs to go away to be replaced with nupps. Nupps will add a little textural interest without looking fussy. Now I’m happy. I’m also happy with those lovely points on the bind-off edge. This design makes lovely points on the cast on edge, too, so a separate border isn’t needed to muddy things up. Joy!

I’ve redone the charts to remove the flowers and small inner lozenges, replacing them with nupps. I’m going to go for broke and cast on for the shawl after lunch. Keep your fingers crossed.