The Princess Diaries

Seek and you will find

Hi, Ted,

Here I am, still creeping along slowly and steadily towards 85 repeats.  I will finish 80 (8 rows to go!) today or perhaps tomorrow, but as I've mentioned, I've temporarily taken leave of my senses and have started working on a modularly knit sweater to enter in a guild show.

Oddly enough, this timing worked out remarkably well.  If you recall, Jean suggested taking a break from the edging before coming to the end of the 85 repeats, and I think that was an excellent suggestion.  I took a full break for three or four days whilst I swatched and began working on the sweater, and now I'm working on the edging for a little bit first thing in the morning when I am fresh and the light is good.  Once I've made some substantial progress on the sweater, I'll be at the point where I can think about starting the next stage of the Princess Shawl.

However, one of the things I've been doing in the last week is checking out the stats for our site -- I end up curious to find out what search terms people are using that lead them to us.  I'll bet you're curious too, so I'll share with you what brought people our way this week:

• crappy yarn
• Rodin the gates of hell
• knitting tours of Scotland
• horse lace knit
• princess anne useful things she did (NOTE:  we sit in the number one spot for this search!)
• shetland lace shawl Hazel Carter
• waste yarn cast on
• circular needle instructions kinks
• nothin but a t shirt
• princess diaries soundtrack (oh, I think we should have one.  Just imagine it!  You're a little bit country -- if, say, the country were, oh, 18thc Germany? --  and I'm a little bit rock 'n' roll)
• christening shawl knit pattern
• princess diaries shawl
• the princess shawl blog ("THE" princess shawl blog!)
• gnomewatch (and I thank whomever searched for that, because I now understand the Evils of International Gnomery.  Gonna have to keep an eye on those gnomes, I tell you...)

Apart from that, I have news.  But I will share the news in a future post.  Suffice it to say that a Very Small Package arrived in my post box today.

Needle, Nardle, Noo?

Wasn't it Peter Sellers who said that, K.?  In one of the "Pink Panther" movies?

(I confess that inventing titles for blog posts is not one of my strengths.)

I've complete 67annabit repeats of the edging. Let me look again, and fire up the calculator here in Windows. {pause} Ah: I have 17 repeats, 5 rows and 8 sts remaining. That's assuming I do all 85 repeats of the edging. I may not.

I looked at the length of edging last night. It's long. That got me wondering whether my 32 inch ( 60cm) needle was going to be long enough to hold all 865 stitches that are knitted up along the edge's...um...edge.

Your thoughts?

Getting Caught Up

Hi K.,

I’m getting caught up on working the Princess, having taken a huge detour into working the Rosebud shawl, and there’s been some stuff goin’ on at work that has required more brainpower than usual. But here I am.

I admit that I kinda stalled out on the edging around row 16 of the 55th repeat. I knew that working the edging was going to get as boring as all heck, but I’d hoped it wasn’t going to be so soon. Previously I’d been counting how many repeats I’d worked: now I’ll be counting them down. “Now there’s 30 to go, now there’s 29, now 28,” and so on. Kinda like when I’m exercising: counting the reps down from 12 (or 10 or whatever), finishing the last one and realizing I still have enough oomph that I can do another rep, and then I know I can do another so I do, and so on. Isn’t that how people motor through their Regia socks? “Oh I’ll just finish this stripe of colour before going to bed”, and then another colour gets started and they finish that one, and soon it’s into the wee hours of the morning.

Don’t buy it, eh? Hm; well I’m not sure I do either. But if it helps, it helps. Maybe readers of this blog who’ve done the Princess edging, or a similarly long edging, would like to leave comments telling how they got through it. I’d surely be interested in learning others’ tricks.

One thing I do know is that, for me, working an edging and attaching it to the live stitches of the border has the job going a lot faster than working a l-o-n-g length of just edging.

I see you’ve thought through pairing decreases in lace. I’ve wondered about this as well, but as the topic is old news here and elsewhere, I don’t think I have anything new to add. Sarah Don uses only k2tog for decreases, so she makes no distinction between left- and right-leaning decreases. (Her book, "The Art of Sheltand Lace", is out of print.) Nor does Hazel Carter. Gladys Amedro uses both k2tog and k2tog-in-back-loops with no mention of slip-knit-pass or ssk. (K2tog-in-back-loops would be my last choice because it adds a twist to the stitches.)

I wondered what the photos in the Shetland Museum Photo Archives would reveal about this. Not much, actually. Generally, the photo resolution isn’t high enough to get clarity, or the photo didn’t zoom in on details like that. There were a few where I could see sufficient level of detail, and I saw the use of paired decreases, and the use of only right-leaning decreases. The photos’ annotations usually don’t give information about when the garments were made or by whom, so there’s no way that I can think of to determine whether the general method was to just work right-leaning decreases and then that evolved to working paired decreases; or whether use of only right-leaning decreases was practised in certain regions of lace knitting activity; or, well, whatever. (Possible research project for a PhD.)

In the end, does it matter? I mean, if you worked an entire shawl and only did right-leaning decreases (so there was no use of left-leaning decreases to compare with), would anyone really know? Would anyone just looking at it -- admiring its gloriousness -- really get down and look at it that closely? Not likely; they’d need a particular reason to do so.

Or does it matter? The techniques of any craft evolve over time, in response to a variety of factors. We do things one way because we know only that way. When we learn another, we evaluate the merits of both: one costs more in terms of execution ease or speed, or whatever criteria are important. If speed is the most important criterium, than you’ll pick the method which is fastest. If the finished appearance is the most important, you’ll pick another way of doing things. I am not a fast knitter, for example, but I appreciate details and ease of execution, so the techniques I use for working decreases will not be the ones that allow me to work fastest; they are the ones that give me the tidiest / neatest results (the difference is often in the details); those which reduce the opportunities for errors (such as dropped stitches), and; those which are most efficiently performed, given my clumsy, self-taught, knitting method. (Yes, I have thought about relearning to knit more efficiently.) And it will vary within a project, depending on the stitches being used, what’s on either side of them, and so on. For example, in one place I may work a left-leaning decrease as ssk, in another it may be slip, knit, pass.

And speaking of the evolution of the craft, had anyone even heard of ssk 50 years ago?

Back to working the edging the edging. Just think, 29 repeats and 4 rows to go.

Knit, Eunny, knit!

And, boy, does Eunny ever knit.

Ted, I sent you this link the other day, so now I'm going to share it here.  The link for Eunny's site, See Eunny Knit, popped up on a couple of the lists I'm on in the past week, and, apart from the fact that Eunny appears just generally to be One Amazing Knitter, Eunny has started writing about knitting lace.

In fact, Eunny is writing about some of the things I'd planned on writing about here, like yarn choices, but she's done it so much better that I don't plan on reinventing the wheel.  Instead, I'm going to send you all over to read her excellent posts.

The "series" is called "Majoring in Lace".  It features:

Part I, an introduction, in which Eunny discusses kinds of lace and shawl construction;

Part II, in which Eunny presents information on yarn choices, needle choices, gauge, and Chart Reading 101;

Part III, in which Eunny writes about the Structure of Lace -- building a lace fabric.

Next up is a post on cast-ons.

Some of what Eunny writes about is aimed squarely at those new to knitting lace, but she also presents her information in a way that gets even the hardiest of lace knitters thinking -- the photos of her samples are wonderful, and her notes on Gauge were, well -- perhaps "vindication" is too strong a word, but like Eunny, I find gauge in lace irrelevant.  However, she has convinced me that I really should be swatching more than I currently do for lace.

So, for those of you thinking about embarking on the lace journey, for those contemplating taking on a project like the Princess or Wedding Ring shawls, go and check Eunny out.  I'm positive she'll give you something to think about as you start your lace journey.

This is what sixty looks like

Dear Ted (and I do hope your computer comes back from the shop soon!) -- behold!

And I have to say, even I'm mightily impressed.

I haven't been knitting all that much in the last week -- a few rows here and there -- when suddenly, before I'd really realized it, I'd had sixty edging repeats finished.

I'm still pinching myself.  If I've got sixty done, then the remaining twenty-five should be over in no time (knocking wood superstitiously), right?

I've been carrying around this little crumpled pile of edging, not really thinking much about it, but I have to say, when I went to lay it out flat for the photograph, I became more and more pleased as it unfurled before me.  It seems like such a small achievement in the grander scheme of life and the universe as we know it, but still, I'm so tickled that it gives me frissons.

Part of me is wondering why I left so long a gap between bouts of fine lace knitting, but even as that thought pops out on the computer screen, I think I know the answer:  it's because fine lace knitting is a fickle mistress, demanding all your attention, demanding that you leave all other projects aside and be faithful to her, and only to her.

I have several other projects on the go.  A sweater in Rowan Felted Tweed that would be nice for spring.  A Nothin' But a T Shirt in Rowan Calmer that would be useful spring into summer.  These two yarns are a couple of my absolute faves, and if they can't pull me away from Princess, then I am well and truly enmeshed in my lace, caught like a fish in a net, if you will.

And Sharon even suggests in the pattern that it's a Very Good Idea to take breaks from working Princess.  And I am planning to take one.  Really.  Once all 85 repeats of the edging are done, I'm going to set it aside for, well, say, a couple of weeks?  A week?  A few days?  Maybe a few hours.

Okay, I'm probably not going to set it aside at all.

It's a sickness, I tell you.  A sickness.

Bear With Me

Hi, Ted,

Herewith, a post in which I pick some nits and attempt to prove a point using completely inadequate photography.

A great while ago on the Heirloom Knitting list there was a discussion about the nature of paired increases and decreases, which arose from a statement on page 38 of Sharon Miller's book, Heirloom Knitting:  A Shetland Lace Knitter's Patterns and Workbook, in which Sharon states that the knitting of paired increases and decreases really only applies when working with thicker yarns.  For those of us, say, working with gossamer merino (as a random example), Sharon suggests that the decreases could just as well be worked as a k2tog, "without affecting the finished appearance after dressing."

This resulted in a bit of a debate, with no definite resolution, as I recall.  Some knitters were perfectly happy just working a k2tog, others felt it was important to still work the paired increases/decreases, no matter what the weight of yarn.

(As an interesting aside, this very thing came up on Marilyn's blog recently -- scroll down to the entry and comments for February 21st.)

Well.  Now.  I've been mulling this idea over for close to two months now.  After I'd worked about 20 repeats of the edging, I decided that maybe I should have thought about this before I'd actually started working the edging, but there we are.

So what I did, I cast on with my Original Crappy Yarn (TM) and worked two full repeats of the edging.  In the first repeat, I used paired increases and decreases.  For the second repeat, I used k2tog for all of them.

An interesting thing happened.

It took me fully TWICE as long to work the second repeat as it did to work the first one.  I can probably explain this by saying that I was likely in a groove with the paired increases/decreases at that point, so switching gears slowed me down.  But I did find it interesting that something that theoretically should have been faster instead slowed me down considerably.

And though I've been trying to convince myself that I really, really can't see a difference, well, I can.

Here's where the hapless photography enters the, er, picture:

The arrow marked "1" points to a line of k2tog decreases.

The arrow marked "2" points to a line of paired decreases.

For the life of me, the "1" is holier than the "2".

Okay, okay.  I know that I'm trying really hard to show you this, and I'm photographing it on an angle, and really close up and whatnot.  But I'm telling you, even before I blocked it, I could see that difference.

So what does all this mean?  Well, probably not much in the scheme of things.  We could apply the galloping horse rule -- if it can't be seen from the back of a galloping horse, it doesn't matter how you work the decreases.  And that's fair enough.

It probably also means that I'm more anal than I previously suspected.  Damn it, I need to work those paired incs/decs!

But what it also says to me is that it's really, really important to try this out before you get knitting, to see what happens.  I can't help thinking about the structure of knitted lace, with pattern worked every row, and how the only structure it really has are those lines made by the increases and, more importantly, the decreases.  If I were to choose, based on my sample, I'd say that the paired incs/decs give my lace a definitely crisper line, which I very much prefer.

And that, frankly, is enough for me.  As always, YMMV, and make a swatch.  You, know, before you start knitting.