Luscious lace

I recently finished my first ever lace shawl. It’s Ishbel by Isolde Teague, and a quick look at Ravelry shows that it’s certainly a popular design - more than 11,000 completed projects. Wow! I knitted it in Sea Silk by HandMaiden Fine Yarn, a silk/seacell mix, in a variegated purple. I bought the yarn ages ago at Stash in south-west London when some knitting chums visited. I had no idea what I’d do with it, but it was so soft and silky and purple that I just had to buy it. And it turned out to be ideal for Ishbel, so how’s that for serendipity?

The finished piece. Prior to blocking, the lace isn't all that impressive.

It did take a while, mostly because I kept getting sidetracked by other things (designing, mainly. Designing is so much fun). But also because of a few mistakes. The biggest one was in the simple stocking stitch section. That’s right - the section that should have been easiest. To make the shawl a nice triangular shape, the centre stitch is flanked by a yarn over on either side; somehow I managed to move my centre stitch and yarn overs combo by one stitch. This meant there was one too few stitches on the first half (and conversely one too many on the second). I didn’t notice this until I got to the lace sections and there weren’t enough stitches for the pattern repeats. I had to undo the whole thing. Damn.

Blocking really brought out the lace pattern
and pointed edging.

But undeterred I carried on. My advice? Use a stitch marker! I don’t know how that stitch shifted but if I’d had a stitch marker in place it wouldn’t have.

The pattern is easy enough to follow - the lace sections being a set of repeated stitches to the centre then the same stitches in the reverse order to the end. Once you’ve got the repeating bit for each row in your head, off you go. My only criticism is that stitch counts aren’t given at the end of each row, just each section, so it can be difficult to keep track of things. In the end I figured that if I’ve got the right number of stitches to repeats then I must be doing OK, and this seemed to work.

The problem is that when you do make a mistake - and I made two - you don’t find out until you’re on the next pattern row (there’s a purl row between each), and when you’re knitting more than 200 stitches this can take rather a long time and involve quite a lot of counting, undoing and redoing. Both my mistakes involved missing out a yarn over, which was easy to spot so I could just make a stitch in the appropriate place and merrily carry on without too much fuss. If you’ve forgotten a k2tog or psso, however, it’s going to be a tad more frustrating as you will have to undo (and redo) nearly three rows.

This is a project that needs to be blocked. Once I’d cast off (nice cast off method, by the way: k2tog, slip stitch back onto left-hand needle and repeat. I’d never seen that before and it creates a lovely cast off edge), the lace section looked, well, a bit rubbish. All scrunched up and ugly. But after a bit of work with some pins and an ironing board, the lace really came into its own - a pretty, leaf-like pattern with a pointy edge.

I’m certainly pleased with the finished object and I’m planning on taking it on holiday with me as a posh evening cover up. Now I just need to go somewhere posh.

Lovely! Now I just need an invite to some place posh so I can wear it.