Look, another long-overdue FO post! Just how overdue is it? Well, I finished the knitting and blocking in December and decided to reblock it in late January. Oops…
Lots of project-related rambling here, so don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Pattern: Lotus Blossom from Fiddlesticks
Yarn: KnitPicks Shimmer in Morning Mist
Needles: US2 Crystal Palace for the body, US8 Clovers to bind off
The pattern’s pretty simple, and the first half of it is especially boring. But in a solid-colored or nearly-solid-colored yarn, it produces lovely results.
However, since I didn’t use a nearly-solid-colored yarn:
KnitPicks’ Shimmer is pleasant enough to work with, but in my eyes there’s one problem with using it in lace – the high contrast in colors. I had originally chosen this yarn for another project because it looked the least contrast-y on my monitors (and there were no color cards available at the time, so I had no real way of knowing), but when I saw it in person, I realized it wasn’t going to work for that project
Lotus Blossom seemed like a good idea, because it had big enough solid blocks in between all the yarnovers. So I started it, and then the colors began to pool, and then I frogged it and decided to just alternate two balls, which gave me stripes instead of pools for most of the shawl… until I got to the last few charts. Blobs of color, here I come!
So, two lessons learned: be careful when ordering online, and don’t use super-contrasty yarns for patterns like this.
Returning to the point of alternating two balls, I carried the unused strands up the side, which may have been a slight mistake (the carrying part, not the alternating part). Or maybe it would have been fine if I hadn’t done it so tightly. As it is, I couldn’t stretch out that side as much as the other, so the shawl’s a bit lopsided. No biggie, though.
The shawl’s quite a bit smaller than the dimensions listed on the pattern page, because I used a finer yarn and smaller needles without otherwise adjusting the pattern. Even after two blocking attempts, Lotus Blossom is still slightly smaller than I’d prefer, but it works, mostly because I’m pretty short (and have a proportionately short torso to boot). In retrospect, since I have so much yarn left over, I could have just doubled the yarn and used larger needles, which would have gotten the size into my ideal range and may have also helped with the color issue.
Those of you familiar with the pattern may notice the absence of bobbles. I generally don’t like bobbles, so I just did a k2tog bind off all around. I actually knit the last plain row on size 8s before binding off, which may have been a mistake. Or not. I haven’t decided yet.
Overall, I’m not completely thrilled with it, mostly because of the color thing, but I do like it well enough, and I’ll definitely get some use out of it.
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