On Blocking Shawls

(Pasteur's Laboratory circa 1885, Musée Ville de Paris)

Interesting what one can find in a laboratory. In my case, knitting supplies.
See this tube of surgical stainless steel rods? Once they'd have been packaged individually and autoclaved by a scrub nurse for repairing bad fractures, fixing the pieces of bone together (something I unfortunately know about first-hand, now having a cyber-ankle due to a bad fall. But I digress). These days they come more specialized, individually wrapped, already sterile and ready to use.
When my lab moved from floor A to floor B, we found all kinds of odds and ends (I'm in a surgery department). Odds and ends come in handy I've found, since I've had to build some of my own apparatus over the years, so I collect them just in case. The other day I came across this tube of rods and thought, Blocking Wires. With 3 lace shawls on the needles at the time, you can see how blocking might possibly be on my mind.

So these appear at a fortuitous time. I finished the pink Shetland Triangles lace shawl for my little niece the other night. It'll be a slightly late birthday present. Let's try these rods as blocking wires. (Soaks shawl, prepares foam blocks, pins, wires, and towel).
Verdict: Bit thin and bendy for a fingering-weight shawl but could be perfect for laceweight and lighter shawls. Fortunately, I also have a blocking wire kit, so out came that.



Much better. These are stiff enough not to be distorted by the shawl so it can dry straight. Seriously, for knitting lace especially, blocking wires cannot be beat. When I blocked sister-in-law's shawl, I was too lazy to dig my set out of the very back of the closet. Lazy is relative, as it turns out, since the time spent pinning and repinning was more than the time I would have spent rummaging in the closet, zipping a wire along the back and another down the center. The steel wires I found should work for pinning out the points of Evenstar. Maybe not all the points, but enough of them to get the shape and dimensions right.
I've never knit a circular shawl before Evenstar, so naturally I've never blocked a circular shawl before. Now that the final clue is here, I need to plan blocking it being it will be 5 feet across when completed and DH, despite being a doll about most things, doesn't think our bed is a good place to block it. He's willing to help me block it on the floor, but my back has other ideas. We shall see when the time comes.
Happy Mother's Day to all.

Knitting Knews

That's what's been keeping me from blogging, the Evenstar shawl. I am done with Clue 5; there are only 2 more clues to go. At nearly 600 stitches per row, it takes about a half hour to do one row. Especially since I count each repeat and each motif inside each repeat. May be slow and may be a bit boring but it's kept me from major screw ups while knitting this shawl.

I would recommend being this compulsive to anyone embarking on a complex lace pattern. The sanity you save may be your own. The other bit of advice I have is to use a good, grippy rubber band (I'm using one from my hair stash) on the ends of the circular needles, to prevent loss of stitches while the project is away. The fancy doo-dads they sell I've heard have a tendency to jump off tiny lace needles at inopportune moments. From what I've read on the Ravelry boards, stitches on complex lace projects have a finite chance of migrating or wandering while the knitter is off doing non-knitterly things. The more complex the lace, the higher the chance that the stitches will wander off the needles according to the formulae:

where z* = complexity of pattern and tau* = patience of knitter to reknit the thing, D being number of stitches the knitter will have to pick up times the number of rows dropped to get back to where the knitter was. Easier to stick a rubber band on the ends.

Since I was in a picture-taking mood, and my boat-load of pins (for blocking Evenstar) came, I decided to take a better photo of the lovely budding lace pattern that is the main part of Swallowtail:

Such a gorgeous little lace pattern! Makes up for the drawbacks of the yarn. You can really see the intriguing Twilight color of the Jamieson's Shetland in the macro. Wonder if adding a bit of hair conditioner to the Eucalan will help it soften.

The Beaverslide Dry Goods yarn and the Miyuki 6/0 beads, came so I can make a pink Shetland Lace Triangles shawl for my little niece, as requested. Just like Mommy's.

Bead All That You Can Bead

No, not a mangled slogan for the US Marine Corps; rather a discovery that I can knit and bead. The Evenstar KAL begins tonight. The shawl calls for 2900 seed beads. That's 3 ounces of size 8/0 beads. Initially I was going to eschew the beads, but the more I looked at beaded swatches (and my own bead stash), the more I thought, "I can do this." Indeed, with a crochet hook (0.6 mm in diameter is what I bought), it's eminently possible to add beads one at a time. Who knew it could be so easy? When my mother knitted with beads or sequins, she strung them all. With this technique, beads can be added at will, in any color order desired. How neat is that? What's even neater is the choice of lovely beads I have. Above are 2 I picked from my stash to coordinate with the Zephyr yarn. I want a subtle shimmer so I picked bead colors fairly close to the yarn color. Both are Matsuno shade 356g, called magenta-lined aurora borealis (AB in bead lingo) or Sparkling Dahlia (listed on my tubes) or Elderberry-lined AB. Maybe that should be Eldar-berry, in keeping with the LotR theme here; bad pun, I know. On the bottom are the smaller size 11/0 and at top the size 8/0 the pattern calls for. I might, just might, try to use the size 11/0; there's something about the more subtle glimmer of them that appeals to me. I want a mysterious look to the shawl, a nighttime look: subtle shimmer that resembles stars twinkling in the sky, not bold glitz and glamour. If I can't get the 11/0 beads on the yarn, well then, the 8/0 beads will have to do.

Now take these beads:

Aren't they gorgeous? Hard to capture the nuances of color, but believe me, they are stunning. This color is called Brownstone Iridescent. I think I'll add these to the edging of my Shetland Triangle shawl. The color will look super against the pale beige. I can't wait for the crochet hook to arrive from Fuzzy Mabel so I can start bead knitting!

And I'll wind up this post with some eye candy for you. Still keeping to the LotR theme, here's a necklace I finished late 2009 I named Arwen. I was inspired to make it by the headpiece she wore at Aragorn's coronation in Return of the King.