Friday, June 29, 2007

Shetland Lace Stole in all of her glory

I finally got around to posting the pictures of my Shetland Lace Stole. My daughter is 5 now and as we speak is pestering me to play Webkinz on the computer. I guess my computer time will be infringed upon until I get her off to college. Sigh.










Shetland Lace Stole
Pattern: Self-designed, but inspired by Sharon Miller's Unst Stole and Hazel Carter's sampler stole.
Size: 35 inches by 90 inches.
Needles: Aero size 2.75mm circular.
Yarn: Lacey Lamb in natural, approximately 1800 yards.
Time to complete: over a year working sporadically.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Shetland Lace Stole Blocking . . . Finally!



After over a year of on and off work, I have finally completed my Shetland Lace Stole. It is my own design although you will probably notice the similarity to both Sharon Miller's Unst Stole and Hazel Carter's Sampler Stole from Gathering of Lace. It is my own creation but like most Shetland Lace I can't call is completely original. None-the-less I learned a lot about designing lace and am excited to begin the next project. Sharon Miller's book, Heirloom Knitting, was a great help.

I used just over two balls of Lacey Lamb for the project. I probably used around 1800 yards or so. Lacey Lamb is a cobweb weight superwash wool and I knit is with a size 2 needle. I would not recommend superwash lace weight yarn because you aren't going to put delicate lace through the spin cycle anyhow. It also makes is much more difficult to splice the yarn. Lacey Lamb is easy to knit though and it blocks beautifully. My only recommendation if you are going to use Lacey Lamb is to work from the outside of the ball. Had I known that it would have saved me hours of untangling yarn.

As for blocking, the final measurements were 35 inches by 90 inches. A little longer than I was aiming for. I used 96 pins to block it. After the painful process of waiting for the stole to dry I will add some more pictures to my blog.




Unblocked

Border

Center


Edging

Friday, June 01, 2007

Victorian Lace Socks and Other Good News


I have some good news today! My Victorian Lace Sock Pattern is the June / July 2007 pattern for the Six Socks Knitalong. If you want a copy of this pattern you will need to join the Six Socks Knitalong and download the pattern from the files section. I am very excited to have people knitting my pattern. It was a lot of fun to design and a nice lacey summer project. The pattern is also fairly elastic so it should work well in a cotton blend sock yarn.

In other news, I went to my LYS to attempt to solve the Shetland Lace Stole yarn crisis. Miracle of miracles the store had another ball of the same yarn in the same dye lot! I should play the lottery with that type of luck. Hopefully I will finish the stole soon and then on to the magic of blocking.