First FO of 2010 is officially ready to be blogged!
This shawl was fun and challenging (particularly chart B). I really love the first lace pattern, it looks like little daisies, very sweet. I also love the border with all those nupps! It's graphic and dramatic. To be perfectly honest, I'm not as crazy about the middle pattern. Even though it was the most complicated portion to knit, I just don't find the resulting lace to be as pretty. However, I don't think that the delicacy of the daisies would work with the boldness of the border without having a strong middle section to breech the two. And though I don't love the middle section on it's own, as a whole I'm very happy with how the shawl looks.
The finished shawl is pretty substantial. It's 55" across (which is almost as big as my wingspan!) and 32" up the spine. After reading on Ravelry that a lot of people considered the Percy shawl to be a shawlette I was a bit surprised by the size of mine, definitely a full blown shawl in my books! I upped the needle size to a 4mm, and I also added a couple extra repeats of the final 2 rows of the border chart because I wanted to make sure that I really maxed out the proportions and used up as much yarn as I could. I wanted to test how much mileage I could get out of one skein of this yarn. I finished with 8 grams of yarn left, and what I consider to be a pretty big shawl, so I'm very happy with how far one skein took me!
After knitting with my new silk yarn I can now confidently say that I am in love with it. I cannot wait to be able to share it with you! It's a dream to work with. I don't actually make the yarn, I just dye it, so though I do like the colour, I can safely say that this yarn is awesome without totally patting myself on the back because I had nothing to do with making the yarn so shiny and soft and drapey and fabulous.
I finished a pair of socks last night, so now I have absolutely nothing on my needles! It makes me feel a little uneasy actually... last night when I finished grafting the toe closed on the last sock and realized that I didn't have something else to pick up and knit on I started to feel a little anxious! I'm sure the feeling won't last long as I have more than a couple projects in mind to cast on for tonight!
