First some administrivia. This site has been under massive attack by comment and trackback spammers. As a result, we’ve totally disabled the trackback feature, and limited comments to the most current three months of entries. We have also instituted a protected comment system to prevent automated spammers. But since the crowd that visits here doesn’t appear to be particularly chatty, that shouldn’t be a problem. We’ve also updated the software that runs the infrastructure of the blog. Whenever a set of changes of this magnitude is undertaken, it’s going to take a few days before the bugs are ironed out. Apologies if you tried to consult these pages and received error messages. We’re working on the remaining nits as fast as we can. Special thanks to The Resident Male – website plumber extraordinaire for the hours he’s put in wrestling with these issues.
In the mean time, knitting here continues. Friend Dena was amazingly generous, giving me more of the gray/brown laceweight (also lots of other goodies destined for some more over the top lace projects). Ten thousand thanks! Armed with more yarn, I’ve been able to work more on the big shawl. I’m rounding the second corner and on the back stretch. No pix today though. It looks much as it did last week – a frothy gray/brown object too unblocked to see well.
It turns out that this blog serves a major purpose that I didn’t really appreciate. I am not good at cataloging what exactly I do as I fudge my way through a project. I was careful to note the pattern and mechanism I was using for the framing area of my shawl, but I hit on the edge pattern during the time I was stretched thin and didn’t have time to write up entries. Therefore I didn’t make a written note of where that edging pattern came from and what I did to adapt it for this piece. Since I also set the shawl aside when I ran out of yarn, I had lost my thread of continuity on it. It took me a couple of days before I located the edging that I was using and figured out what I had been up to. It’s from the first volume of Duchrow reprints compiled by J. and K. Kliot:
I now present it here as much to keep track of what the heck I’m up to for myself, as for others to play with. The pattern I’m using appears on Page 35. The original stumped me a bit because I couldn’t make the last three stitches work out correctly. According to the book, every row should end with a SSK, K2 – but I find that working the “uphill” side of my triangular dags, I have room for a plain K3, and on the “downhill” side as the dag narrows back, I have room for a K2tog, K3 – but need to cheat, working the first stitch on the wrong side return row as a P2tog to preserve the visual line of the narrow strip at the outer edge of my border.
The pattern page (click on image above to get a readable version) presents both the original from the book, translated into modern notation; and my adaptation.
String-Or-Nothing 