Tag Archives: Forest Path Stole

I am in love with FPS so far. Even if it kinda sorta looks like crap right now. But that’s pre-blocked lace for you.

I am taking full advantage of my ability to knit back and forth. I’m a bit slow at purling back with laceweight yarn, but between this project and Lotus Blossom, I’ll be getting lots of practice.

The wrong side rows of the Lily of the Valley chart call for p5tog, and that’s something I have trouble doing no matter which hand I’m using. During the first WS row, I did a k5tog back (remember, I didn’t turn). Didn’t work quite so well, so when I got to the second instance of the decrease within the row, I turned the work around and tried the p5tog right-handed. That was even more of a fiddly failure than the lefty k5tog. So now I just slip 4, knit 1, and pass the slipped stitches over, which works well.

I’m going to have to put this down and try to ignore it for a few days, though. I really need to finish painting my living room; it’s been in sort of a half-done state since my parents visited.

On an unrelated note, I’m currently looking for a good yarn to use for the Channel Pullover (the next sweater in the pipeline). I tend to overheat, and I’m generally fine in regular old sweatshirts down here in San Diego, so I’m thinking that a 100% wool yarn might not be the best thing for me. Not for a pullover like that, anyway. My question is, would that be a safe assumption?

Anyway, back to knitting.

My next lace project is the Forest Path Stole from IK Summer 2003.

The charts, unfortunately, are a tad squint-worthy. And I like highlighting charts as I work on them, and I wasn’t about to do that in the magazine. Especially not when I have an average of 22 repeats for each chart (taking into account my adjustments for size).

So I ended up redoing the charts on my computer. I don’t have a knitting font or anything, and I don’t even have Excel on the computer I used for the charting (why I decided to use that computer for this is a mystery to me), so it took a little bit of time with a graphics program.

“Why didn’t you just scan it?” you may ask. Simple: the effort it would’ve taken to scan the whole page, clean it up, crop the charts out and resize them legibly is probably equal to the effort it took to recreate them. Really, it wasn’t all that hard for me.

It’s awesome, because now I can print up a page for each tier. Which is helpful because the chart you start with changes with each new tier, and all charts have rows you only need to work on odd- or even-numbered tiers. And I can highlight! I don’t know how dependent I’ll still be on the charts by, say, tier five, but it’s nice to have the option to print multiple copies.