Rats, Dagburn It, and Oh Noodles!

Last night I just gave up and completely unraveled the shawl I’d started in Noro Transitions using a pattern from Wrapped in Comfort. I was perfectly happy with how the shawl looked, but I was getting more and more impatient with the mistakes I started making when I hit the lace pattern with a twenty-stitch repeat. With two hundred and seventy-nine stitches on the needles at that point, tinking had become an endless slog. The fact that I was tinking Noro only added to the torture. I love Noro, and have decided I particularly love Transitions, which has a consistent weight, but a variety of fibers that make for stroke-y, pat-y goodness. But the color variegations—particularly in one of the rare subtle shades of Noro, which is what I was using—make the individual stitches hard to see, which increases both the likelihood of error and the difficulty of tinking. I still count this yarn among my treasures, but this isn’t the pattern it wants to be knit up in.

Instead, I think I’ll start over and try using Malabrigo. How’s that for rationalizing another yarn purchase? And in the interim, I’ve started knitting up Rosebud in Ariel, a nubby cotton-rayon blend from Cherry Tree Hill, in their Fall Foliage colorway.

Technical notes:
I wanted to add two observations about the pattern in Wrapped in Comfort that may be helpful for others using the book.

First, while the written instructions for the lace stitch were correct, the chart had an error. On Wanda’s Flowers Shawl p. 32, Chart B, row 33, the first SSK should be replaced with a K. If you like working from charts, I would strongly recommend either comparing the written instructions with the chart or knitting a swatch before beginning to avoid ugly surprises when you have a gazillion stitches on the needle.

Second, most of the patterns begin with a large, loose cast-on with ten stitches or so—which, in the version I was knitting up, seemed to make a rather narrow initial neck measurement. When I case on my Malabrigo version, I’m going to start a few rows down with a cast-on of twenty or thirty stitches. I don’t know yet how this will work out, so I am not necessarily recommending it; I’m just mentioning it as a possibility.

And please don’t let either of the two above comments turn you off from this book. The patterns are lovely and very do-able (despite my Noro-related problems).