FO: ishbel

It's done, it's done! It took me way longer to finish this once I'd gotten off the plane and was too busy eating and saying hi to everyone in Oakland, but it's finally done, and I'm so happy with it :) 

I always shied away from lace, in large part because many of my lace projects - include three earlier attempts of this shawl - all ended in disaster. Knitting on an airplane somehow really helped me get over the lace thing - and this pattern is so beautiful that I totally want to knit more lace shawls now. 

Other thoughts on the pattern (Ishbel by Ysolda Teague): I will forever love this pattern for making me love lace. Once I figured out the mistake I'd been making in earlier attempts, the lacework flew by! Just make sure your Sl 1, K2togs, PSSOs all line up, and this pattern is remarkably forgiving of mistakes. I had 400+ yards of sock yarn, so I made a smlarge shawl, knitting the stockinette as if for the small size, and the lace as if for the large. The resulting size is just right, I think - I can wear this over a fancy dress or kind of bunched around my neck in the autumn. 

and the yarn (Juno Fiberarts Alice Sock in Canopy): oh my god, this is the most beautiful yarn I have ever touched. I know knitting bloggers are probably prone to hyperbole when it comes to this sort of thing, but I swear this time I'm serious! I love how soft it is, and the gorgeous variety of colors it comes in - though, tragically, the price (I paid nearly $36 for a skein) and the international shipping (I've only found it in the UK) make this a bit prohibitively expensive.

ishbel in the sky

Before coming home to Oakland, Iain and I stopped for the weekend in London so I could fly out of Heathrow. Since Iain is staying in Scotland for the summer, I've been fairly bad about rationalizing all the yarn I've bought recently as a much needed distraction - I can't miss my boyfriend if I'm too busy knitting obsessively, right?

Anyway, while in London, we stopped at the gorgeous Loop yarn shop in Islington, where I picked up a skein of Juno Fiber Arts Alice Sock. All of the colorways were gorgeous, but I eventually settled on a ($32!) skein of canopy, a sort of bright robin's egg blue with a bit of green in it. I'd been planning to make a pair of socks, but once I got back to hotel and wound this into a ball, I decided it was far too beautiful to put on your feet. The only other pattern I had printed out was Ishbel (from the earlier, failed, and now frogged Ishbel that kept me company throughout Vietnam, India and Scotland), so I figured that was as good a use as any.

Fortunately, it turns out knitting on an airplane with no real distractions is an ideal lace-knitting environment. I blazed through the stockinette body, and then the entire A chart. I also figured out where I'd gone wrong in my first attempt: in trying to stay on top of the pattern, I'd put markers between each 8 stitches, not realizing that the borders eat into those stitches and that if you just trust the pattern as it's written without trying to overthink, you'll do fine  - at the time, I couldn't figure out why I kept coming up wrong on both ends of the row, and it was maddening. This time, I just read the pattern super carefully, paid close attention to where the S1, k2tog, PSSOs lined up, and though I'm sure there's still a bit of weirdness, it definitely looks much better this time around - I can't believe I was in such denial about my first attempt being totally hopeless. The slightly heavier cashmere sock yarn looks much nicer than the initial skein of madtosh praire, too - I am completely won over by this yarn and how soft it is.

So anyway, that was my goodbye to the UK - having Ishbel to focus on during the long flight back did keep me from getting too sad about having to say goodbye to Iain for the next two months. If you are ever in London, I do highly recommend Loop. I've been to a few yarn stores since heading back from Asia, and they have by far the biggest selection of yarn (and the widest color range) that I've seen so far. I love also that they have a nice selection of books from some of my favorite independent designers like Stephen West, Ysolda Teague and Gundrun Johnston; and also, a good range of luxury and more affordable yarns.   

Definitely recommended! 

lost: knitting mojo

Whenever I don't knit for awhile, it always takes me awhile to regain my knitting mojo, for lack of a better, less dorky term, and my first attempts to pick up the needles again always feel clunky and awkward. Case in point: my tri-country Ishbel, to which I clearly did not pay enough attention during my intermittent attempts to pick it up while traveling through Vietnam and India (though partially this is because I crashed my motorbike directly onto my wrist and was a bit out of commission for a few weeks - though it's OK now!) After two days of dutifully working away at it here in Scotland, I finally had to come to terms with the fact that after three repeats of the charts, it looked nothing like the gorgeous Ishbels populating Ravelry. Not even a tiny bit. I've never been much of a lacy shawl knitter, so it's probably not surprising that I wasn't doing my best while trying to read a faded, crumpled pattern in a Mysore hotel room while deciding if I could justify ordering room service curry while watching reruns of last year's So You Think You Can Dance (I could, it turned out).

I'm too embarrassed to post photos of my terrible Ishbel, but - as much as I'd love to have a lovely knitted shawl I could say I worked on in three countries - I know that it's too far gone and that I'm going to have to just give in and frog the whole thing. My fear of frogging and all the wasted time it represents is one of the reasons I'm probably so willing to accept imperfection in my knitting projects, and though I'm typically fairly laid back about not being perfect, I do think that this time around, for myself, striving to get it right is the only way I'll ever be able to manage lace - otherwise I'll just end up with a closetful of horribly mangled shawls that even I'm embarrassed to wear in public. So a little perfectionism is a good thing, right?

In the meantime, depressed by my total loss of knitting mojo, I cracked open the only other project I had waiting for me in the UK. Months ago, when we were packing up and moving out of our house in Japan, I sent enough yarn for one Snowbird sweater to my boyfriend's Aberdeenshire home. I'm knitting it in Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light, which at the moment feels a bit scratchy, but which has a nice texture, particularly on the reverse stockinette in which most of the sweater is knit. Besides that, though, it just feels nice to be back in my knitting comfort zone, using nice familiar size six needles and being able to knit and watch TV again. Yay, sweater knitting!