4S premier

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

I'm totally cribbing this themed-post idea from Gwen's T-shirt Tuesday posts. She's okay with it, though.

I can't remember the last time I showed you any knitting progress, let alone finished objects. To remedy that, you lucky readers you, I'm going to attempt weekly posts on Saturdays (or Sundays) with photo updates of projects I'm working on.

I generally have at least one scarf, shawl, or pair of socks on the needles, hence the S theme. These three projects are my favorites to knit because they fulfill the three Ps - portable, practical, pretty. (I promise to stop with the alliteration now.) The materials for all three project types don't take up much room, so they fit into a small bag you can keep with you all the time so you can knit on them when you have a few spare minutes or fifty. These project types can all keep you warm as well as make you look spiffy. And there's so much pattern variety, both simple and complex, to keep your visual interest.

All of them are good for spring and summer knitting, too, because you don't have a lot of heavy yarn in your lap like you do when you knit a blanket or a sweater. (Ooh, this may renamed 5S in the fall, when I start knitting sweaters again.)

I'm going to start 4S with a photo essay of a shawlette knit-along I recently finished. I tweeted updates and pics after each section was completed, but I realize not everyone is on Twitter.

I've read Wendy Johnson's blog for awhile now, and I've always admired her lace patterns. She's got a new lace knitting book coming out in August and ahead of that, she's been doing a few group knit-alongs. For non-knitters, a knit-along is just what it sounds like - a group of people knit the same pattern and compare notes in the process. Everyone's using different yarn in different colors and maybe even different needle sizes, so despite it being the same pattern, there is lots of variety in the finished results.

It gets even more interesting if it's a mystery knit-along. You know what the finished object will be, but not what it will look like in detail. Sections of the pattern are released (in order) at regular intervals. The good thing about this process is that you work on the project a bit at a time, and it seems far more manageable that way. There's no real deadline, so you knit at your normal pace. There's no problem if you fall behind because the next pattern clues will still be available when you catch up.

For this mystery lace shawlette knit-along, Wendy suggested fingering weight yarn without too much varigation, and size 5 or 6 needles. I decided to use Knit Picks Stroll in the Tidepool Heather colorway.

(All photos taken with the Instagram app on my iTouch - I'm having a little too much fun with the retro pic options on that app.)


This is 239 stitches cast on with two rows knit.

Unfortunately, I had to rip all this out because the stitch count was incorrect in the pattern. It was supposed to be 241 stitches. Wendy discovered it pretty quickly and alerted the group. She even had a fix if you'd cast on the 239, but it only worked if you hadn't started the first lace row, which I had, so after a short visit to the frog pond, I was able to re-cast on with the correct number of stitches.

First 14 rows:

Twelve rows added:

Tristan wanted to help:

Another 72 rows added:

The last 20 rows added and the whole thing bound off:

Blocked! (For non-knitters, blocking means stretching a piece and pinning it to get it sized correctly, and for a lace project, to get the pattern to pop out and not look like lumpy tangled noodles.

I think it turned out nicely, and I'd probably knit it again. The only changes I'd make are to take out the "spine," since I generally don't like that look in shawls (it's easily done by omitting the yarnovers on either side of it that make the line of holes), and I'd make it a little bigger since the average yardage of fingering weight yarn that I buy would easily cover another pattern repeat or two.