My last post was about our trip to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. In May. More than seven months ago. That’s terrible! I was a little busy, though, as you can see. And I was knitting the whole time. I’ll catch you up.
As I said in that last post on May 15th, I bought four skeins of white cashmere and the Estonian Garden Wrap pattern, and immediately upon returning to Texas, I cast on for a shawl for my wedding. I was knitting two strands at a time to get gauge, and I quickly realized that four skeins wouldn’t be enough. I hopped on the Internet and ordered three more. Miraculously the skeins that arrived were from the same dye lot. Score!
I knitted and knitted and knitted on that eyelet lace pattern. In white. Repeat after repeat after repeat. To be honest, even though I was knitting an heirloom piece of lace for my own wedding, using a luxury yarn, it got a little dull.
By August I’d knitted about three feet of lace. And then one day, I looked down at the shawl pooling in my lap and realized that it wasn’t a shawl. It was a blankie. A beautiful, soft, fluffy blankie, but a blankie nonetheless. I didn’t want to wear a blankie at my wedding.
This posed a big problem. The wedding was in November, and it was August. I was going to have to start over, and the wedding was three months away. I logged on to Ravelry and started searching for shawl patterns. I found Eudyptula’s Wedding Shawl, a small white lace shawl big enough to warm the shoulders but not so big that it would overwhelm a wedding dress. I sent her a direct message asking if she thought it was doable, and within 15 minutes she’d written me back.
She compared it to the shawl I had been working on, and thought that it might be too challenging. She suggested the Shetland triangle shawl, which I’d previously discounted because I hated the points on the edge. A quick Ravelry search turn up this one by Loopy, who had omitted the last two rows to remove the points. I sent Loopy a message, and she replied back that she thought it could be done by November. I had a new plan!
A lunchtime dash to the yarn store netted two skeins of Euroflax Linen and Wrap Style, the book with pattern, and I was off. By the big day the shawl was knitted, washed and dried eight times, blocked on wires, and ready for the wedding. And the Estonian Garden is carefully sealed in a ziplock bag in the closet, waiting for a bound-off edge and its destiny as a receiving blanket.
- January 4, 2009
- Posted in Finished Knits
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