Progress (finally) and some thoughts on charts

Hi, Ted,

Voilà!

And spread out just a bit:

Yes, I'm slow -- that's eleven rows done, and I started the twelfth this morning.  It's going to take a Very Long Time to knit this -- I pretty much spent all my knitting time on it in the last week, and now I've got to get back to some other things, so I'll only work on it at the rate of a couple of rows a week, I think, until I can clear some other things out of the way.

But at least it's progress.  I am very pleased with it.

I did want to ask how you were dealing with the chart, specifically the last repeat of 70 sts -- and I'd be interested in hearing from others working on Princess as well.  I know there are a goodly number of folks getting excited about the possible re-release of the pattern at the end of this year, and I think it might prove useful to document what I've come to think of as a few quirks of the chart.

You've already written about the single overs/double overs and substituting the chart from page 162 of "Heirloom Knitting".  I'm also looking ahead to what happens after row 180 -- I'm wondering why their aren't two charts for that part, where you have to orient the motifs to point left and right.  I can already see that I'm going to end up charting them myself, as I'm not the kind of knitter (not at this point, anyway) that can work it out in my head and just do it.

And I'm recharting the end of the last repeat as I go along -- this isn't a big thing, it's just that as it's charted, one must be mindful of the fact that one can't always work that final edge as written -- if one wants to keep the stitch count of the final repeat even at 70 sts, then sometimes a yarn over isn't worked, or a 3 to 1 decrease is worked simply as a k2tog.  Do you know the bit I mean?  Did you do it automatically?

I had to think about it.  It's not every row, so when I hit the first instance of it, I realized I had to work out the decreases and increases and make sure they matched, and then make sure I had the right number of stitches at the end.  It threw me for a loop the first time, but now I'm automatically thinking ahead at the end of that repeat.

And because there are, quite possibly, a few knitters out there like me, I mention it here as something to be mindful of as one works the shawl.  This is one of those patterns where it doesn't pay to be a blind follower, which is the type of knitter I tend to be.  I actually like following the pattern.  I know you prefer to see if you can improve on things, or find a technique to make things more efficient or more elegant.  That's not me, generally, but working on Princess, I can see the value of that approach. 

At the very least, I can see that the effort to understand how lace works is one of the most useful skills I learned.