Thursday, September 07, 2006

A Basket Case

After winding up 800 metres of alpaca the other day*, I took my Flower Basket Shawl to KOL for some advice and encouragement. The Ninja helped me with the crochet portion. Alison reassured me that I was picking up the stitches properly. Moe helped me interpret the "pick up along selvedge", etc... and everyone else offered moral support.

As of this morning, I had knit the Upper FB chart and had this to show for it:

Flower Basket Shawl - Beginnings


What's that? It doesn't look like much of anything? Hold on, lemme stretch it out for you:

Stretching out the Flower Basket Shawl


That better? Good. It's really, really hard to stretch out something like this shawl all on your own. Here's what you can't see in the photo above. And yes, that's on top of my desk at the office. Of course I closed my door. I don't need my coworkers to have any more reason to tell me that they think I'm weird.

I'm using the yarn that the pattern called for in Interweave (Misti Alpaca). As of right now, I have finished the first pattern repeat of the Lower FBS chart. But I'm confused now. It says to repeat that chart 6 more times. But I don't understand how it works. There are 27 stitches (or something like that) one repeat of Row 1, but there are 40 stitches before the marker. WTF?
I'm going to need to consult the gurus. Oh Gurus? *singsong voice* Um, help?

Ok, it's late and I'm exhausted. We had our annual luncheon for the first year Pharmacy Students today. I always find this day to be very tiring. Ugh.

Maybe tomorrow I'll get to talk to you about Henry and Mauve's "reunion".

* Winding 800 metres of anything should count the same as running 800 metres. Surely it does.

6 comments:

  1. Is there a red square around part of the chart? My experience with IK lace patterns is that once the 1st rep of the chart is done, the pattern then continues using the first row within the red square, and the stitched within the red square are repeated to the end of the row.

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  2. Anonymous8:04 a.m.

    I see what you are talking about and can help. (Evelyn Clark does her charts similarly for her leaf lace shawl).

    OK.

    Looking at row 1:
    knit the first section to the red line. Put a marker there. That is the first "section" of the row. Knit the section in the red box repeatedly until you are 7 stitches away from your centre marker (including your centre stitch). Place marker. That is your "repeat section" on right hand side of your shawl.

    Do the next section to the green line - this is your centre stitch. (I placed my centre marker after my centre stitch and made sure it looked different from the rest so I remembered it is the centre).

    Do the same thing for the left side of the shawl. Knit to the red line, place marker. Repeat section inside red box until there are 8 stitches left (include the two end garter stitches). Place marker. Go to end.

    Does this make sense? If not, call me.

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  3. Oh, and I'm starting the Swallowtail shawl next week so it'll be my turn to get help on all this crochet stuff ;)

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  4. Steph has prehensile toes! Monkey! MOOOONKEY!

    *ahem* Sorry. Looks lovely so far tho. :)

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  5. I have no advice...just sending you warm happy thoughts and affirmations: "You WILL knit this! It WILL be gorgeous! I BELIEVE you can DO IT!"

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  6. Nice pedicure! (Oh, and the lace looks pretty too)

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