Traveling Woman, and Netherfield has been let at last

I had a lovely time at knitting yesterday, but was distressed to find that sitting and talking for 3 hours with great friends, surrounded by good coffee and yarn fumes, left me shaky and exhausted. I guess I have a ways to go before I can call myself recovered.

I did finish knitting the Traveling Woman Shawl on Thursday night, so I could show it off yesterday.

As with all unblocked lace, it looked pretty pitiful, all wrinkles and blobs.

Ah, that's much better. Though I discovered the drawback to knitting lace with a totally inelastic yarn- it doesn't stretch (duh). I really wanted to block the edges into scallopy points (as I've seen in many of the bazillion finished Traveling Woman photos on Ravelry), but even though I bound off with needles 2 sizes larger than what I used for the knitting, I simply could not shape the edge into anything but a straight line (not that those are straight edges, but you know what I mean). It's certainly pretty, but not what I had envisioned. Final dimenions: 52"x 19"- a perfect little neck warmer for chilly mornings, and it's light enough to wear as a scarf over a nice sweater indoors.

I also learned what most lace knitters already know- brushed mohair is not ideally suited to lace. It's gorgeous, don't get me wrong, but I lost a whole lot of stitch definition by using a fuzzy yarn for this project.

On the other hand, a little fuzz is a good thing. Since this was a very fast project, I think I'll knit it again, with a wool yarn, just to see the difference (maybe with some beads along the edge).

But even when I'm healthy, I can't knit anything that requires concentration (and even easy lace has to be paid attenion to) while I'm at my knitting group. So I dug through my Twisted Fiber Arts Stash Box (yes, it has, and deserves, its own box) and finally decided to wind up my skein of Netherfield (in the Playful base- a heavy fingering weight, my absolute favorite yarn for socks). Netherfield is the colorway that I coveted the most, back when Twisted consistently sold out their entire stock 15 minutes after opening up sales. It took me several months to score a skein, and it's been sitting in the box, waiting for inspiration ever since. I finally realized that this yarn doesn't want fancy stitches, or patterning. A plain vanilla sock is the perfect display for the amazing dye work of Meg from Twisted. Look at those colors! Worthy of the name, no? Can you not see Jane and Bingley cavorting among the flowers? (and at least on my monitor- those colors are exactly what the yarn looks like in person).

And as a special treat, after knitting, I stopped at the Starbucks in the Target store and had a Salty Caramel Hot Chocolate. I am not given to initials in all caps often, but OMG!

(side note: it's just as well that I didn't see the nutritional info on that little cuppa until just now... again OMG!)

Travelin' On

I have 2 rows left on the Traveling Woman shawl, which I will finish tonight. I also hope to wet block and pin it out, so I can take the finished shawl to knitting tomorrow.

It's going to be strikingly beautiful, I think. Though, as with all lace, we won't know what it *really* looks like until after blocking.

My teeny criticism of the pattern (not charting the beginning and ending stitches) still stands, but truly, it's an easy lace pattern and it's more than likely that my own fuzzy-brainedness interfered with my ability to remember to K2, YO at the beginnings or endings of a couple of rows. My biggest problem with this project has nothing to do with the pattern or my brain's spotty functioning- it's that this beautiful yarn is totally inelastic, and the needles I'm using are fairly blunt. That combo makes some of the SSK (or as I prefer: K2togTBL) and K2tog stuff needlessly difficult. If I had a sharper needle in the right size/length, I'd switch in a flash. But I don't, therefore I complain.

By tomorrow morning, I hope to have a pic of the finished shawl, which may be a world record for begin-to-end on a project of this size (mostly because it's not a big shawl, and because I can't do much else except knit and cough).

Speaking of coughing- for those who have asked: I'm feeling better, slowly but surely. I'm done with the antibiotic, and will finish the Prednisone in 3 days. I'm stuck with the inhaler for a full month, but as much as I hate it, I'd hate pneumonia even more. The hardest thing now is to refrain from exercise- even walking on the treadmill leaves me drained and coughing, so the best and wisest course of action is to give myself a week to rest. But after exercizing 6 days a week for three years, and running 3 miles a day for the last year, I feel like a slug just sitting around (not to mention that I have not cut 400 daily calories to compensate for the lack of motion). However, my improvement is steady, and I hope to be back to full speed by the time I throw that blasted inhaler away.

P.S. You want evidence of the fuzzy brain? I forgot that it was Thursday. Again. I'll post the paper doll tomorrow. Sorry.

Traveling Woman Shawl(ette)

My friend Pat asked me to look over the Traveling Woman Shawl  (Ravelry link) pattern because she was having a hard time following the chart, though she freely admitted that she had a hard time with charts in general.

I said I'd download the pattern and check it out (it's a free download) for her, and we'd get together on Friday, before our knitting group meets, to see if we could figure out what the problem was.

I saw immediately what her problem was- though almost 5,000 Ravelers have this project in their queue, and 183 pages worth of them have posted pictures and comments, and though I didn't read them all, I could see that very few had any trouble with the instructions whatsoever- I thought the instructions and charts were a little hard to follow too.

I'll grant you that I'm no lace expert, but every lace pattern I've knitted (or designed) with a chart, has ALL of the stitches for each repeat right there, on the chart. For this pattern, every row begins and ends with K2 and a YO, but those 3 sts are not on any of the charts, which confuses my brain mightily. When I follow a chart, I don't want to have to memorize additional stitches- I want them all on the chart in front of me.

Even more mystifying, Row 2 on both the A and B charts are basically *not there* except for the center stitch, even though every other row is represented fully. I cannot for the life of me figure out why that row wasn't drawn and charted like every other row.

Now, these are very small criticisms, and experienced lace knitters will have no problem whatsoever following the instructions or charts, but I can see why Pat was having trouble. The pattern itself is lovely, and the lace is easy (it's a variation of the Horseshoe Lace pattern, which is funny all by itself, given how obsessed I've been with that repeat for the last month), and the shawl is easily enlarged from a small neck-decoration to a full-sized shawl. I do recommend the pattern, as long as you can remember to add those uncharted 3 sts on every row, and you can just work Row 2 without further instructions.

It's a very quick knit- I started it mostly because I thought that would be an easier way to help Pat, but I've really enjoyed working on the shawl. I am on the final chart now (the openwork border), and may actually finish the knitting tonight (I decided to make the small version, even though I have plenty of yarn).

The repeat is gorgeous, and the yarn is even gorgeouser. It's from Twisted Fiber Arts, one of the yarns from the Luxury Yarn Club from a year ago or so. The yarn is Fluffy (90% kid mohair, 10% nylon), 450 yards, 120 grams, the dye pattern is Subtle (softly mottled), and the colorway is Vixen. Like all Twisted yarns, this is amazing stuff- incredibly soft and fluffy (just like the name), and the colors (red, orange, gold) are fantastic. This sort of brushed mohair isn't perfectly suited to lace knitting, but it's coming out really well (you don't want to have to rip this out, but so far, I've not made many mistakes) and it's going to be totally gorgeous.

And I'll have more than enough yarn when I'm done to knit a scarf (or maybe a really fuzzy doll sweater...)

Side note: this yarn and colorway do not appear to be available at the moment from Twisted, but that doesn't mean that it won't show up on the roster again sometime

Didja miss me?

While we were in North Carolina, my sister Sandi looked at my huddled, pitiful, hacking self, and said, "You don't get sick often, do you?"

{cough} "No, " I said. {cough, cough, hack, cough}. "I'm never sick." {cough, cough}

"I can tell," she said, not unkindly. "You're not very good at it."

Truer words were never spoken. I started coughing a week before I left for NC, and I assumed that I would either will it away, or ride it out quickly and easily. Almost 4 whiny, complaining, ugly weeks later, the cough had morphed into a whooping/gasping/nasty sounding thing that made it impossible for me to even walk 2 miles on the treadmill without losing a lung (and running, especially running out in the chilly air, was, and is, totally out of the question). Still, I had taken penicillin (okay, it was OTC Mexican Penicillin, but it was medication, and I did a full course) and I thought I was on the mend. Then on Saturday night I had a breathing episode (which is a misnomer- it was more like an inability to breathe episode), which quite frankly, scared the bejabbers out of me. On Sunday, I went to the Acute Care Clinic where they took one look at me and prescribed an inhaler, steroids, and a strong antibiotic, and very sternly told me that if I wasn't markedly better in 5 days, that I was to return. They didn't lecture about the Mexicillin, but I sensed deep disapproval.

The antibiotic put me to sleep (10 1/2 hours the first day), and the prednisone keeps me up, and the inhaler makes me cough (this is my first experience with one- I bought into the commercial animation, where a puff of magic stuff opened your airways and you breathed easier... not so. The inhaler makes me cough, and it makes my lungs hurt, and it tastes vile and it can cause thrush if I don't rinse my mouth thoroughly, and I have to use it for a full month). But... this morning I had a sensation that I did not, at first, recognize. Then I realized that a car was not parked on my chest. So I may have turned the corner on this thing.

In addition to all that (and Sandi was right- I am terrible at being sick: I whine, I feel sorry for myself, and I am just enough of a hypochondriac that I think I'm far sicker than I am, while at the same time resisting going to the doctor*, which means that when I really am ill, I am REALLY ill by the time I finally do something about it), we have had company for the last 5 days, and I am deep into the first draft of my YA Fantasy (which I rashly agreed to have done on Dec 1)(Is it gonna happen? Maybe. I hope. if I don't sleep for the next 3 weeks).

So, blogging (like my daily 3 mile jog) went by the wayside.

But when I was awake, and not coughing and not blogging and not writing and not sleeping and absolutely not running, I was able to knit and catch up with my fantastic (and very patient) sister-in-law.

I finished the festive socks.

They turned out pretty cool.

And a friend of mine was having trouble with the charts for the Traveling Woman Shawl, so she asked if I would look them over for her. I decided knitting it would be easier than just looking- and I got a good start. I'll post links and all of the stats and the comments tomorrow.

But right now, I think I'll go take a nap.

*this is how pitiful I am- not only do I think I am very ill when I have nothing more than a hangnail, I am afraid that whatever it is that I have, is a whole lot worse than anything that I can imagine, so I put off going to the Doctor because I don't really want to know the real diagnosis. Like I said, pitiful (the only thing that I'm pretty sure that I don't have is Housemaid's Knee).