I am totally in love with the yarn (Wooly Wonka Tupelo Gold), which is extremely soft, and the color changes are much more subtle in the knit fabric than they were in the unwound skein.My biggest problem so far is the "winglets" in the beehive section. They look really loose and sloppy, and I can't figure out how to tighten them up... unless I am just supposed to assume that they will fix themselves when the shawl is blocked. Here is a closeup:
I struggled getting started because of some confusion over counting the BO2 as the first Knit stitch, but once I got that in my head, it has been pretty smooth sailing.
If any of you have tips for potential pitfalls, I would love to read about them!
2 comments:
Oh that silly husband of yours, asking how many shawls you need...there are still 365 days in a year (and 366 every four years), right? ;)
I'm a pretty tight knitter, so my winglets are fairly "compact" although I think that I also might be giving a bit of a tug to the yarn after I do the second BO before moving on to the next stitch. Don't know if that is making any difference. If all the winglets are a little loose on your shawl (and I can't see that they look sloppy) then at least they're consistent. And my experience with blocking lace is that a lot of things *do* work themselves out very nicely.
Congratulations on finishing Swan Lake! :)
Your winglets are longer than mine, but as annmarie said, they're consistent, and that's what really matters. I seriously doubt that they will tighten up or change appearance much with blocking.
What I do, is pull the two e-wrap (reverse cast on) stitches tight around the needle. Then I knit the two bind off stitches (and the first chart stitch) close to the needle tips, and pull each knitted stitch tight around the needle. In passing the two bind off stitches over, I stay close to the needle tips, but these stitches naturally enlarge a little. This method produces a sort of "picot" at the edge. If you try to knit and bind off the e-wrapped stitches normally, they will enlarge and consume extra yarn.
Unless you really hate the way your winglets look, you should just continue doing the winglets the way you've been doing them. You have such a great start, I shouldn't think you would want to reknit all that from the beginning. I'm quite envious!
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