Tag Archives: Forest Path Stole

Look, an FO!

(Not entirely true to color, but close enough!)

Pattern: Forest Path Stole by Faina Letoutchaia, published in Interweave Knits Summer 2003

Yarn: Jaggerspun Zephyr in Bottle Green. It’s wonderful to work with and has a lovely sheen to it. I used just under 2520 yds/8 oz.

Needles: US3 Crystal Palace circulars and DPNs

I really enjoyed knitting this! Normally stoles bore me to tears, but the entrelac and the continuous switching between charts kept things interesting.

The stole looks like a more intimidating knit than it actually is. This was the first time I’ve done entrelac, but it’s not a difficult technique. The lace charts aren’t too hard, either, but if you ever knit this, don’t forget to check the errata first!

I never managed to get the selvedge stitch count to work out for the left side triangles, but that wasn’t a big deal – I just picked up one less stitch along those triangles and adjusted the next row accordingly.

If I could have done anything differently, I would have figured out a way to attach the side borders as i went along. Because the lace was the fun part, and the seed stitch border was a bit monotonous and anti-climatic afterward.

Before I got to the actual blocking, FPS spent a good amount of time in the bathroom sink. This is because immediately after I started washing the stole, the water turned into a lovely shade of lime green. (I’d post a picture of it, but none of the one I took showed the hue in its full neon glory.)

Yeah. Wasn’t expecting the stole to be that much of a bleeder.

So, I broke out the vinegar, added some to a new batch of water, and soaked FPS for a little while. Unfortunately it didn’t help enough, as FPS insisted on bleeding through the following couple of rinses. At least the color was lighter, but still, serious bleeding going on. Back into a vinegar rinse it went. And the cycle repeated until the water was finally close to clear.

You’d never know how much it bled unless I told you, though, because the color of the yarn still looks pretty good.

Here’s a detail of the stole while it’s still on the blocking board:

It turns out that my length estimate was quite a bit off, because I’d forgotten how the seed stitch and selvedge edges would limit how much I could block this out. Without borders, the stole was ridiculously stretchy when dry; with borders, I was lucky to get five feet of length when damp. It’s still longer than I am tall, so it’s a perfectly reasonable size, though I would have preferred it to be longer.

I’ll be heading out of town for the weekend shortly, so I won’t have time to take finished photos until Monday. Look for a happy FO post then!

On Saturday afternoons, I can be found knitting at Rebecca’s with local bloggers. More specifically, for the past few Saturday afternoons, I could be found knitting the Forest Path Stole borders at Rebecca’s. I’ve deliberately brought this project, and only this project, because I find seed stitch incredibly tedious, and I knew that if I bought something else with me, I wouldn’t touch FPS at all. That, and the conversation makes the tedium much less painful.

Until this week, I hadn’t had time to knit outside of the weekly SnB. Unforeseen changes at work led to overtime for the bulk of this month. Lots of overtime means little energy, and little energy means lots of sleep, and lots of sleep means little knitting.

So while I’ve barely touched any of my other projects, hey, at least I made fantastic progress on FPS!

I’d just finished the left border before leaving Rebecca’s this past Saturday, so I spent the past couple of nights working on the top border. I finished the actual knitting Tuesday night and completed the bindoff last night. (I did the sewn bindoff called for in the pattern, and while it looks nice, it takes forever).

All I have to do now is block. I’ve borrowed Jessica’s blocking wires, so the latter process should be relatively painless.

Needless to say, I am very excited about this!

I rewound the leftover yarn, just for kicks, and this is what remains of the 8 ounces I started with:

Makes me even more glad that I stopped knitting the lace and entrelac part when I did, instead of knitting two more tiers. Because man, what a close call!

Kristen organized a knitting get-together at Rebecca’s last Saturday, where I met Jennifer, Allison, and Erika for the first time. There were also some familiar faces: Kristen, Jessica, Marisa, and Cora. I was pretty quiet, but I still enjoyed myself.

The goal is to make the get-together a weekly thing, but this weekend is also a Whistlestop weekend. I’m trying to decide whether I should go to both or just pick one.

I will hopefully have a new project on the needles to work on by this weekend, because lately, the Forest Path Stole has been my only knitting-in-public project.

It’s a lace and entrelac stole, so it doesn’t look particularly simple. In fact, it’s apparently somewhat of a minor miracle that I can still pay attention to (and occasionally participate in) conversation while knitting FPS.

However, I’m on the 15th tier.

This means that I’ve knit each chart at least 16 times. By this point, I’ve long memorized each chart’s internal logic, which means that I don’t have to refer to my printouts very often.

So FPS is actually the easiest project for me to tote around right now. Neither of my remaining WIPs is as suitable for knitting in public. Eris is a bit too large and fiddly for me to tote around (trying to knit sleeves in the round when they’re already attached to a sweater body is not so fun). And my toe socks have a non-intuitive striping pattern, so I can’t just mindlessly work on that in public either.

I’m getting fairly close to the end here. I’m done with the lace either at the end of this tier or after tier 17, and then I’ll only have the seed stitch borders to do.