Friday, April 13, 2012

Rough Sea Shawl


Rough Sea Shawl requires 360-440 yards of fingering weight yarn. I have 462 yards, assuming that I have 50g in each ball of palette. I have 99 g between the two balls, rather than 100g.. but this should still be enough. (I'm kept my fingers crossed!)


This is my first triangular shawl. I knit the shawl on size 7 needles. In the end, I used 86 g of wool for this project (you can see my notes as I kept weighing what I had left as I knit below.)

I finished the first ball of palette on row 97 (out of 110 before beginning the lace edge)- I am only a tiny bit worried about running out of yarn. However, this is the K2, YO row, and I didn't want to start a new skein of yarn on a YO. Therefore, I made a K2tog with two strands held together to help make the change secure.

  • After row 110, 35 g remain. I was starting to get concerned that I would run out of yarn, but I knew I could just do two repeats of the lace not three like Remcat put in her chart.
  • After the first 8 lace rows (repeat #1) - 27 g remain.
  • After 16 lace rows (repeat #2) - 18 g remaining
  • Although I had plenty of yarn left to do a third repeat, I decided to just repeat row 1 (or really row 17 of Remcat's chart), do a WS row and then bind off. Looking at pictures of these projects, I like the way the 2 repeats looks a bit better.
Now came the next dillema, how to bind off. In the Polaris shawl, the bind off needed to be tight to provide structure for the shawl, so this wasn't a concern. I therefore decided to do a crochet bind off where I would chain 1 in between each stitch. (I don't really know crochet nomenclature, so this is the best description I can give to what I did!) I used a size H (5mm) hook.


I used my grandma's knitting needles for this project. I have been using these needles for a lot of projects lately because I like feeling like I am holding her hand as I use a tool she also used for so many hours.


One thing I love about knit shawls is that you cannot find them in stores. There are many fantastic knit scarves you can find, but knit lace shawls are so unique that they are bound to be a conversation piece.