Tag Archives: Tina Shawl

It figures that I wouldn’t notice an error until I posted it on my blog…

There’s a little counting error in my Tina shawl notes. Unfortunately, by the time I made the last post, I’d already cast on the incorrect number of stitches and worked across the first plain row. Oops!

Oh well. No other mishaps since then, and I’ve already completed the center triangular section.

I tried a new provisional cast on for this project – the first invisible cast on illustrated in Part 4 of Eunny Jang’s “Majoring in Lace” series. After trying this cast on for one of my swatches, I decided that this method is my new favorite provisional cast on. Very fast and easy!

I’ve been pretty single-minded about this project so far. The stitch pattern for chart 1 required very little attention, so it was a good thing to work on while watching World Cup games. And, since I couldn’t get to the more interesting charts until I finished this section, that gave me even further incentive to keep working on this.

Next step: picking up stitches around the triangle!

Almost all of the charts for the Tina shawl are patterned for both odd and even rows. And as much of this piece is worked in the round, the chart key does not mention the wrong-side equivalent of the decreases, as they’re not necessary for this pattern.

Unless you’re modifying it to be triangular, and therefore knit back and forth. Wrong-side equivalents then become a necessity.

Finding out what the equivalents are isn’t too big of a deal. The decreases article in Interweave Knits Summer 2003 mentions most of the ones I needed. For the rest of the equivalents, I used Ariel Barton’s “Decreases from the Flip Side” as a reference.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of things. I’m a big fan of knitting back backwards with stockinette and stockinette lace, mainly because turning a piece disrupts the flow of knitting and becomes pretty awkward for me after awhile. But with the patterning on every row, I had a decision to make: did I want to just suck it up and turn the piece every row, or did I want to figure out how to work every decrease backwards?

(Why, no, I’m not quite as meticulous with blocking my swatches as I am with my lace nearly-FOs…)

I ended up doing the latter. Swatching chart 2 while knitting back (and decreasing) backwards was quite the learning experience. I had a couple of missteps in the early rows, but I think by the end of the swatch I was managing quite nicely.

I can knit left-handed English in addition to knitting backwards, which has given me a decent understanding of stitch construction. Knitting backwards has also increased my ability to visualize the wrong side of the piece, even with I’m knitting with the right side facing me. Those two things made it fairly to figure out how to execute, say, an ssp tbl backwards.

I’m probably sacrificing some speed by doing it this way instead of just turning the piece with every row. But that’s okay, because it’s not always about speed. Sometimes it’s about learning and practicing new skills, and this project will let me do quite a bit of the latter.

Speaking of new things, here’s another one that’s come about because of this project:

I bought a sketchbook and turned it into a knitting notebook. I’ve been meaning to start one for awhile, one where I can keep my swatches in the same place as my notes. So far, everything I’ve done for Tina is in here.

The plastic bags on the left-hand page (yes, there are two, one’s just hiding beneath the chart 1 swatch) are attached with glue dots. I cut off part of each bag near the right-hand side to give me easier access to the swatches inside.

The right-hand side contains notes and a chart for the first section. As written, the first section of the shawl is a square. I’m modifying it so that it’s a top-down triangle, so some math was necessary. Yay. Sometimes number-crunching is fun!

It’s been too hot to work on anything heavier than a sock, so I’m excited to have a new lace shawl in the wings.