Progress on my shawl!

I’m finishing up the edging along Side #3, in preparation for Corner #3. Then it’s the mad dash along the final side. It’s taking a little over week per side, so I expect to be done by the end of next week. Then the sorry thing gets added to my blocking pile, which has itself become an embarrassment.

Now is the part of any project that I find the hardest. No new challenges, just more of the same, with the siren call of other things beckoning me away. For example, there’s the Resident Male’s Galaga hat. I need to finish that before cold weather sets in. And the quickie strip scarf out of black Merino Lace. That was begun as an interim project until I could finish the big shawl. There are other half-finished things from The Chest of Knitting Horrors(tm) that I really need to finish, too. Like my dragon-skin Rogue. Older Daughter is looking pained about it.

But (and I’m sure my fellow flitterwing knitters will understand) there’s something that’s calling to me. In the back of the Duchrow #3:

there are six hand-drawn charts included as an appendix. They’re not well documented, and use slightly different symbols than the more formal repros in the rest of the book. The key and few accompanying notes are not only in German, they are a medium-quality photocopy of the pattern author’s hand-written script. That makes them very difficult to decipher, especially considering that I don’t read German. Marginalia names the author of the appendix charts as Gertrud Weywod, a “contemporary of Christine Duchrow.” I’ve done some cursory searching for more info on her, to find out if anyone else has worked these patterns up; and to see if any of her work was ever published professionally in her own day. So far, I haven’t turned up anything, but again – I can’t read German and don’t have access to much in the way of German-language libraries. If you’ve heard of this pattern author, please let me know. I’m itching to find out more.

As you can tell, these patterns fascinate me. Several are floral rather than geometric, and most of them are very complex. One of the simpler ones reminds me strongly of some double running stitch and counted band patterns from patternbooks published in Germany in the 1520s.

I think I’ve deduced what most of Weywod’s graph symbols mean. Using those assumptions I’ve translated one of the graphs to modern notation. I’m proofing it now – doing the calculations to see if given each row’s stitch counts, increases, and decreases, whether or not my assumptions are knit-able. I’ve also got some lovely sage green laceweight – another gift from Friend Dena. So it’s pretty much a given that by the middle of the fall, I will have fallen to a new challenge, and will be hopelessly fuddled working out the Weywod patterns.

But first I have to finish my shawl, and that hat, and all that blocking…

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