Snowflake Scarf - Done!

The Snowflake Scarf is done and blocked, and I am quite pleased with it. I think when I started knitting on this one I thought it was going to be a replacement to my everyday black cashmere one that Joe had given me a couple years earlier and that I had lost. Silly me - I always think that I can knit fine lace and somehow bear to drudge it around the muck that is my every day life. Nope - I need something a little sturdier than that, which is why I ended up knitting the purple one a couple months ago. But this is beautiful, and it will be lovely for fancier occasions. But we'll get to that in a minute.

I started this scarf way back in December of 2006. I was full-throttle working on the blankie at the time, but I needed a project to keep in the car for the days when I couldn't get the girls to nap at home, but when they would magically fall asleep in the car and stay asleep long enough for me to drink a cup of coffee and relax with some knitting till my sanity came back into semi-focus. Those were some tough days, and as nice as it was to be able to hold some knitting and pretend to knit a row or two, progress was quite slow and sporadic.

The yarn was Fino by Alpaca with a Twist, which is laceweight 70% Baby Alpaca and 30% Silk, given to me by my SP 9 Pal in one of the best swap packages I think I have ever received. This yarn is scrumptious, and knit up nicely. I still have about half an ounce of it left and am wondering whatever I will do with this lovely little nugget. It is very soft, and has the silky shine and feel, but with a light halo from the alpaca.

The pattern is "A Russian Lace Scarf to Knit" by Dixie Falls and Jane Fournier, which was published in Piecework in the May/June 1995 issue, and more recently reprinted in the July/August 2007 issue, which is still available for order on Interweave's website. I had seen a knitter-friend of mine wearing a scarf that she'd knit with the pattern and she was kind enough to loan me her copy of the magazine to knit from.

I haven't seen the reprinted version (have just ordered a copy for my files), but in the 1995 version, the charts are hand-drawn with symbols that are not standard by today's standards at least. So I transcribed them into more modern charts using Stitch Painter Pro, at the same time combining the main pattern with the edge patterns so I could look at them all in one row. I'm horrible at memorizing stitch patterns. For better or for worse (I think for better, actually) I made a mistake when I was transcribing the pattern and omitted a row from the border patterns. It didn't make much difference in the look of the borders in the end, but it did work out so that the border charts ended on the same rows as the middle section charts. This meant that I could do exactly however many repeats as I pleased instead of working to a multiple of three as the original pattern required. One more repeat would have been no big deal in my case, but if I had been running out of yarn (as so often happens) having to choose whether to go another three repeats and risk running out would have made me grind my teeth.

Let's move on to the pictures! As I've mentioned before and as I believe the knitting community generally agrees, unblocked lace looks like crap.



Well, not entirely crap, but certainly not living up to its potential.

Oops - we interrupt this discussion of lace scarves for a cute-kid pic. The girls got new rain gear, and I let them go out in the nice, gentle rain we had all day Friday to splash around for a while. That was all the gettin' out of the house we did that day, because I'm still not quite well. My neck is better, but now my stomach is off. soon, it will be summer, and hopefully the solar radiation will kill off some of the germs that have plagued us lo, this long, long Minnesota winter.



Aaaand back to the lace. The scarf and I held a little blocking session, in which I once more employed my blocking-with-sock-yarn technique. I love blocking this way. I keep reading blog posts about how wonderful blocking wires are, and I get so close to buying a set, and then it comes time to block something and I use my standard technique, and I realize that I don't need another piece of knitting equipment filling up my yarn closet, and that I think I'm happier with this method anyway.



I use very few pins - mostly just at the corners to hold the ends of the yarn lines tight, plus a few along the longer sides to make sure I don't get dips. This time I got the yarn lines tight enough that they stayed almost perfectly straight on their own. I do measure half- and quarter-way down the line an make sure that the points are spaced evenly. In the picture below, you can see a pin that I stuck into the cloth just below the blocking area to mark where the half-way point is.



I like this method best because you get to string the "wires" in before you soak the lace, and I think sitting on the couch threading dry lace points onto sock yarn at my leisure has got to be better than rushing to get all the points onto the wires after they're wet but before they start to dry. But I've never tried wires, so I'm not speaking from full experience. Another advantage is that my "wires" are always exactly the right length.

I probably could have blocked it an inch or two wider, but I blocked it exactly 16" point-to-point so that it will fall into the scarf category at the fair instead of shawl/stole. The competition in the scarf category is stiff, and I don't necessarily expect to win a ribbon, but the shawl/stole category is even tougher! It'll probably need a fresh blocking by August, but it's not like I was going to wait that long to show it off. And, um, I'm not going to tell you exactly what method I ended up going with on the edge-joining. I'm just going to say that *I'm* really happy with the way it looks, and if you want to remind me, I'll tell you what I did after I get the results back from the fair.



And on to the glamour shots. Not very glamourous, really...but you can imagine if I had a nice dress on that it would make a pretty accessory for a fancy party.



And it would go just fine with my coat if I wanted to wear it to some cold-weather knitting event.



Yay!

I've already moved onward to the next project in the mean time. I've got a good little start on my Sunrise Circle. More on that in the next day or two - I'm really happy with how it's cranking along.