Tag Archives: Tina Shawl

I actually unpinned this from the blocking board on Tuesday morning, but since there hasn’t been sufficient light to take pictures of it after work, I’m just now getting around to posting this:

It’s official, I’m in love with this shawl.

Detail shots:

And now, the notes.

Pattern:
Tina Shawl by Dorothy Siemens (Fiddlesticks Knitting)

Yarn:
Jaggerspun Superfine Merino in Ruby

Needles:
US3 / 3.25mm Inox Express circulars for the border and lace edging
US4 / 3.5mm Inox Express circulars for the center triangle
US5 / 3.75mm Inox Express circulars for the i-cord edging

Modifications:

• Made it triangular, rather than square. I used Birch (from Rowan issue 34) as a model for the center triangle’s construction.
• Incorporated short rows into the edging, to get the angle of the top edges lined up with the rest of the shawl.
• Added i-cord along the top edge. It makes a really nice edge, at least on the border and edging. It looks nice along the center triangle, too, but didn’t help much with the slight rippling there, despite how severely I blocked it. Perhaps going down a needle size for that section’s i-cord would have been better…

This shawl was a fantastic learning experience for me, thanks to all the modifications, and it was also a lot of fun to knit!

Tina’s pretty much the only thing I’ve worked on this week. I’ve just turned the corner, putting me over halfway through the edging:

At this rate, I’ll finish the edging sometime next week.

I won’t be done after the edging chart, though. From the earliest planning stages, I intended to finish off the top of the shawl with an attached i-cord edging. Which is going to be a monotonous pain in the butt, but I think it will be worth it. Besides, if I work on it at Rebecca’s, that will help the task fly by.

I can’t wait to have the finished shawl in my hands. I’m so incredibly pleased with how this is turning out so far. I keep putting it down and pinning sections of it out, just so I can get a better idea of how it will look after blocking. It’s definitely a lot nicer in person than it is in the pictures, considering my complete inability to accurately photograph the color.

My modified Tina shawl is constructed as follows:

The arrows illustrate the direction the knitting is worked in.

As you can see, the direction of the edging is perpendicular to the direction of charts 2 and 3. This fact becomes very important if you’re making a triangular shawl and you want all the top edges to line up. Because if you knit the edging repeat straight on to the main body of the shawl, without any modifications, the top of the edging will slant downward. Like so:

See what I mean? It might end up looking okay, but it’s not really the effect I’m going for.

I also can’t just follow the pattern’s instructions for corner edging. I know this because I tried. The instructions require that you attach an entire 16-row edging repeat to 4 corner stitches. I didn’t photograph my attempt to make this work, but trust me, it failed. It produced too much extra fabric, which just bunched up in a really unattractive way. I could have blocked it to flatten it out, but even then, the top of the edging wouldn’t have lined up the way I wanted it to.

So I broke out the pencil and knitter’s graph paper and re-worked the ends of the edging to include short rows. Swatching my new charts gave me these:

Neither is absolutely perfect, but they’re very close to what I’m looking for. With a couple of minor modifications, I should be good to go.

I’ve been flying through Tina. It’s such a fun project to knit that I don’t really want to put it down! But, like every good knitblogger, I do have to set the shawl down every once in awhile to post a picture of it:

All I have left is the edging.

It turns out that the edging is actually garter stitch lace and not stockinette lace, which means I have to rethink it a bit. I’m fairly sure that I’m still going keep working backwards on the wrong-side rows, despite the fact that I don’t purl back backwards quite as quickly as I knit; if it saves me the trouble of turning the piece every 20 or so stitches, then it’s worth the effort, in my opinion. But, I’ll have to keep in mind that the charting is literal.

I find the literal charting a bit annoying, because it deviates from the convention of presenting all charted rows from the right side. Due to this convention, I’m used to reading, say, the k2tog symbol as “k2tog on right side, p2tog on wrong side” instead of “k2tog on both right and wrong sides.” The fact that I have to read this edging chart differently from how I’m used to drives me a bit batty.

Oh well. I can always rechart it if it starts to bug me too much.

I completed my second and final July knitting goal a few days ago, but I’m just now getting around to taking pictures.

Here’s what the bottom center of the Tina shawl looks like after completing chart 2:

I’ve fallen into a nice rhythm on both right-side and wrong-side rows. Before, the wrong-side rows were a bit stop-and-go, due to the fact that I was decreasing while knitting back backwards, but I’ve really gotten the hang of those decreases now; they’re no slower than the right-side decreases.

I figure I’ll finish chart 3 and at least some of the edging in August, so I should have a new shawl just in time for fall. Yay!