Scene: Kelly hanging the shawl on a nail, awkwardly trying to finagle it to snap a good photo. Then, a sudden realization that the shawl sticks perfectly to the porch brick!

Pattern: Spring Things Shawl, by Susan Lawrence
Yarn: Tess superwash merino laceweight, in super-bleedy red

Pretty, huh? It’s a fairly small shawl, about 50 inches across the top. I may have felted the yarn a wee bit as I rinsed the yarn for the billionth time, but it’s still a good shoulder-warming size.

I ended up working 4 additional pattern repeats of the body pattern, but omitted the last few rows because I ran out of yarn and was too lazy to dip into the second skein. I finished the last edging chart and thought I was home free yarn-wise, but there were a few additional rows to knit, plus a bind-off setup row and the BO itself. I think I cut out 4 ending rows, so my points aren’t as pointy as they could be. I’m happy with their pointiness, though.

Besides that issue (and the bleeding saga), the pattern was well written and easy to follow. And so pretty. I totally love the edging chart.

Because I’m unable to knit a pattern without fiddling with it, I modified the body pattern to flow into the edging, rather than having a distinct line as in the pattern photo. I did this as follows:

• Copy chart B. Take the pattern repeat of chart A (in the box) and paste it onto the lower-left corner of the pattern repeat of chart B. You’ll end up pasting this four times, you’ll see where to do so – two of the repeats are in red boxes, the others are to the right of the red boxes.
• Convert all of the purl stitches in rows 1 and 3 of the modified chart B to knit stitches.
• In row 5 of the modified chart B, replace the k2tog with sl1-k2-psso, and replace the ssk with k3tog. This sounds backwards, but is not – the triple decreases will slope in the same direction as the outer decreases. Only replace the stitches in the pattern repeat section, not along the center line and edges.

Work the modified chart B once, then two repeats of the pattern chart B.

Some nupps are not like the others. Yikes, I didn’t notice this until I uploaded the photos!

The thing still bleeds like crazy, but I’ve officially given up! A gentile squeeze in the bath spreads pink dye everywhere, like an octopus ejecting ink into water. I called the ladies at Tess and they were very nice about it, suggesting dish soap (no change) and offering to send a new skein to me. I’ve now learned my lesson about the crazy reds.

I’ll be gifting this with a big caveat about the bleeding and an offer to knit another shawl in exchange. I guess this gives me an excuse to knit more lace this summer!

The time has come to block the Spring Things shawl. I was planning on having a good FO report today, but instead there will be a bit of whining and a lot of pink.

The first round through the bath was full of pink. My swatch bled a lot, so this was expected. No problem, we’ll rinse and repeat until the water runs clear. The problem is, the water never ran clear. Bath after bath was full of pink – the second I squeezed the shawl, it would inject dye into the water.

My google-fu brought me to this old post by Grumperina, who emperically showed that Synthrapol didn’t make much of a difference for the bleeding issues, but that vinegar did. I had some vinegar on hand (but no Synthrapol), so I gave that a shot. That worked fabulously – the shawl did not bleed at all while in the vinegar bath. Unfortunately the fix was temporary, subsequent baths to rinse out the vinegar smell brought back the pink.

Next I tried to set the dye by filling a dyepot full of water, bringing it to a simmer, adding tons of vinegar and the shawl, and cooking for a half hour. Dyeing without the dye. I baked banana muffins while I waited for the simmering to complete, which improved my mood slightly. The result?

The Tess laceweight is superwash, so I also tried repeatedly running water directly on the shawl and squeezing it out when saturated. The only thing that did was turn my hands pink.

So now what? I don’t think I can gift this as-is, poor Rob’s grandmother is going to turn her clothing pink when she wears it. I’m going to try buying one of those dye-attracting sheets, crossing my fingers that it will work for wool. Anyone have any suggestions? Also, I have one extra skein of the Tess laceweight, in the same color and purchased at the same time. Would it be fair to request an exchange, or is this standard behavior for intense red yarns?

There was one bright knitting event this weekend – I bought a bunch of $2 yarn on clearance from Yarntopia on Saturday. Some was gift yarn, and the rest were a few extra balls in a dyelot of yarn I already own. That doesn’t count as breaking the yarn diet, right?

I finished the knitting on my Spring Things shawl!

Blackie says that she would prefer to lounge on blocked lace. Maybe I’ll block it soon, maybe not. It’s a gift for Rob’s grandmother who we’ll be seeing in July, so I’m thinking that I’ll block it closer to our trip up north.

Also, I realized that I need a bigger ball winder:

This is the most recent handspun again, partially ball-wound and partially kelly-wound. That kelly’s quite a machine, I tell ya. I’m still kinda bummed about the spinning/plying job on this one, but I’m pressing on. All in all, it’s 109 grams and about 18 wpi.

Just when I was so over Chart A:

I’m finally finished with A and on to my modified B. I’m pleased with my mods, they look much better than the sloppy swatch. However, my shawl is a bit small. It’s about 12 inches tall, unblocked, and my hasty measurements show that I’m going to gain about 3 inches in height after blocking to make 15 inches total. Chart A takes up more than half of the shawl height and the total height should be about 30 inches, so I’m definitely on the road to knitting a smaller shawl. I didn’t do the called-for gauge swatch in stockinette, but I can only assume that my gauge is way way off.

It’s easy to add pattern repeats, but it makes me sad to rip what I’ve got, especially with all those nupps. Can I just say that working nupps is SO much easier on the pointy Knitpicks needles than Addi’s? I had to use a darning needle to do the p7tog when I made Madli’s Shawl, and that was such a royal pain. There are only 5 stitch nupps in this shawl and I can somewhat easily work them without pointier reinforcements, resulting in much less swearing from camp kelp!

This is the Double Breasted Seed Stitch Jacket, from Exercise Before Knitting. Baby-in-law is due in August, and I’m going to have a gaggle of baby sweaters ready. I’m still considering making a baby blanket – I’m afraid that I’m catching a bit of the miter fever that’s going around.

This sweater contains my first, real, live buttonholes – the double-YO action of the Asymmetrical Cardigan don’t count. I’m feeling the need to knit up a buttonhole-comparison swatch, you know, just because.

A swatch for the Spring Things Shawl, which I started for reals last night. I guess the Tess Laceweight was the first of the bunch to get balled up and knit. Beware – this yarn bleeds like a mofo when I blocked the swatch. It looked like a shark attacked my swatch. Like a knifefight in the sink. Insert your own simile here.

I’m planning on making a slight change to the pattern. If you take a look at the pattern photo, you can see a distinct line between the main body pattern and the edge pattern. I’m going to make more of a transition between the two charts – if you look at the left half of the swatch above, you’ll see that transition, while the right half is knit to-pattern. Clicky on the swatchy if you like, there’s boxes describing the action more clearly.

I have finished the Airy-whatever, but no photoshoot yet. I wore it to MDSW for about an hour – it was hot in that MD sun! Or maybe it was the frenzy for yarn that caused me to ditch whatever extra layers I had for additional mobility.