Charting the Princess

The Princess shawl is constructed in a complex and interesting way. If you are familiar with the pattern, you may recognize this rough schematic diagram that has been circulating on the web for a while.

When I first aquired the pattern booklet and was getting ready to begin, I made a point of reading all the way through the instructions so that I would know what to expect at each stage and have a clearer grasp of how the various elements of the design fit together. The details of how and why this happened escape me now, but for some reason I found myself on an airplane at the time. I guess it must have been a break from classes and I was en route between where I live and where family members were gathering. Anyway, there I sat with my shiny new pattern book, gazing with anticipation and reverence (and maybe just a soupçon of dread) at the prospect of what I was about to undertake.

Certain procedures described in the booklet confused me at first. I found it hard to picture them in my mind. Remember that I teach foreign language and freshman composition. Words are my primary medium. But with needlework instructions, I often find that too much verbiage can get in the way. When you come right down to it, after all, the foundation of knitting and sewing and crochet and so on is geometry: lines and curves and shapes and axes of symmetry. So as I sat there on the airplane, I instinctively reached for a pencil and paper and made a rough sketch, numbering the stages of the shawl's construction, step by step, as I went. By the time I was finished, I had not only figured out how the process of knitting this shawl was supposed to work, but also made some initial calculations for expanding the number of border feathers from 11 to 13 (as Sharon Miller suggests for extremely fine yarns like the CashSilk).

That humble little diagram — drawn in pencil on the torn bottom half from a letter sized sheet of paper and not at all to scale — went everywhere with me all through the ensuing months and proved itself useful again and again. I eventually had to adjust some of my stitch-counts, of course, and I scribbled new calculations all around the edges, whenever it became necessary. Do you think that I threw it away when the shawl was complete? Oh no, dear reader. Perish forfend!! I kept it tucked into the pattern booklet as a souvenir. It's like a miniature diary of the whole knitting process.

Shortly before the end, though, partly in response to a discussion on the HK Yahoo Group where Sharon Miller posted a diagram of her own to illustrate the finished shape of the bottom edge (after blocking), and partly out of a desire to preserve a more permanent (and aesthetically pleasing) record of what I had done, I used my favorite computer graphics program to produce a nice clean, professional looking rendition of the same basic concept.

I posted this to the HK Yahoo Group at the time, but now with the blog I can make it available to a wider audience. Here it is. Just click on the image to bring up the large version (so you can read all the fine print)...

I really tried to make this diagram an accurate representation of my Princess shawl, with its somewhat altered proportions (2 extra border feathers, larger center triangle, etc.). Yet even this careful sketch would prove to be misleading, when I finally got the fabric stretched out on the blocking wires and began to understand its true shape.

And that is a segue to my next post...

Graft and Corruption (more on the Princess)

Dare I admit it? Grafting lace makes me really, really nervous. Racing pulse, sweaty palms, dry throat, the whole bit.

So before attempting anything on the Princess, I did some hunting around on the Internet in search of inspiration and advice. A quick Google search for the words "grafting" and "lace" revealed an interesting pattern that I found both telling and oddly humorous in approximately equal measure.

Many of the links that turned up were expressive of frustration and/or dismay, and some used *very* colorful language to describe the frayed emotional state to which the writer(s) had been reduced by their first (and second, and third, etc.) attempts to follow well-intentioned instructions designed by others, at least supposedly, to make this notoriously maddening process more congenial to those unaccustomed to it.

No less an authority than Sharon Miller herself has this much to say on the HK web-site: "I think grafting is one of the most difficult things to do in lace knitting and it seems that a lot of knitters share my feelings." And again this (here): "Lace Grafting - only for the brave!"

This is NOT an undertaking for the faint of heart, that much is clear. It reminds me of the ominous warnings often posted near roller coasters and other amusement park rides.

But I took courage from what I had gleaned from my web-surfing, as well as from a handful of suggestions offered by the generous souls on the HK Yahoo Group (where I posted a query), and so I gathered my tools and soon set to work.

Mind you, the seam in question is no more than 3" long. Just 29 little stitches. How hard can it be, right? Or, as my eldest brother is fond of saying, "What could possibly go wrong?" Famous last words...

In the end it took three separate tries and many painstaking and persnickety hours, but at last I came to the conclusion (perforce??) that I had achieved enough precision & accuracy to convince me that it will do. By the end, I honestly didn't know how many more times I could afford to rip the @$%&@#!! seam apart.

Though perhaps not the triumphant walk-in-the-park that I might have wished for, this experience did give me a chance to experiment with several different techniques, and that, I must admit, was highly instructional. Here is the low-down...

Attempt #1: I used the waste-wool method attributed to Lucy Neatby and illustrated both here and again here. The idea is to knit a few rows of garter stitch with contrasting yarn on both sides of the graft and then binding them both off before making the seam down below them. The advantage of this method is that if you know what you are doing and pay close attention, the contrasting threads (where the waste-wool meets the lace fabric) can serve as guidelines for your grafting. I found that part intriguing. The problem I soon encountered, however, was that the gauge of my gossamer yarn is so fine that the waste-wool got in the way and obscured the underlying pattern. So because I could NOT in fact see what I was doing, I failed to perform the necessary decreases on one side of the seam, and the whole thing ended up being off kilter and out of alignment. Grrr.

Back to the drawing board. But first, of course, I had to recover and/or reconstitute the two sets of loops after taking out the seam, which was a decidedly unpleasant process.

Attempt #2: This time I placed the stitches/loops onto a pair of dpn's, one on either side of the graft. That made it really easy both to see the stitches and to keep the seam *loose* (as a wise knitter who lives nearby had stressed in her reply to my query on the Yahoo list).

I think that the second attempt might have succeeded, too, except that I wanted to tighten it at least somewhat prior to blocking, and in that process I very nearly went out of my mind trying to distinguish the grafting thread from the lace fabric proper. Let me reiterate: these are tiny, indeed well-nigh microscopic stitches, and by necessity the strands of yarn (i.e. top loops, bottom loops, and grafting thread) are ALL the same color. So especially in clusters of stitches I found it very difficult to tell which was which — and in circumstances like that you definitely don't want to tug on the wrong loop!

Yet I would probably have been OK and gotten away with it, if the grafting thread hadn't first tangled itself up and then actually broken. At least it was only the grafting thread and not, as at one point I greatly feared, part of the fabric itself. I was very worried that it might have been one of the constituting threads from the provisional cast-on. THAT would have been a nightmare to reconstruct. *Phew*.

Even as it was, the whole thing had disintegrated into enough of a mess (does the phrase "Mongolian cluster frog" exist? It should.) that I decided with gritted teeth that I had better tear it out and start over. Again.

Recovering the loops a second time did not take as long as the first, but the process was far more unpleasant, owing to the fact that the well-worn yarn of these poor stitches had started to "bloom" (i.e. grow fuzzy), a prized characteristic of the CashSilk, to be sure, but one that is generally expected to emerge only after washing & dressing.

Attempt #3: Grim determination. By this time I knew that I had very little margin for error left. Three simply *had* to be the charm. Above all, I really needed to see what I was doing, so that I could judge the effect of each grafting loop before creating the next one (and thereby avoid big mistakes). The dpn's had not hidden the lace as much as the knitted waste-wool had done, but they were not exactly transparent either. So for this attempt, I placed the loops on single thin strands of contrasting waste-wool. Inevitably, without needles to hold them the loops themselves shrank to the diameter of the contrasting yarn, but at least I could keep better track of what I was doing.

Here is a closeup photo of the end result, taken during the blocking (click on the image for an expanded view). I kept the seam relatively loose, and did not either tie down the ends of the various threads or remove the strands of waste-wool. Thus it should be possible to make minor adjustments if necessary, or even (GOD FORBID) to tear it all out & start over, without fear of having to reconstitute the loops yet again.

It may not be quite perfect, but its defects are only minor and that is GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. Time to make peace with it and move on.

The Princess Shawl

Like many of Sharon Miller's exquisite designs, the Princess Shawl was inspired by a museum piece: to wit, a wedding gift made for Alexandra, Princess of Wales, in 1863. On her website, Sharon dubs it "one of the most complex Shetland lace patterns ever offered." This project therefore enjoys a certain notoriety in the lace knitting world, and one can safely regard the process of completing it as a rite of passage. That is certainly how it felt for me.

I finished the first row on Pearl Harbor Day (December 7th), 2007, and the last row on May 9th, 2009 — almost exactly 17 months later. Through the seamless, organic design of the pattern, the penultimate step before washing and blocking the fabric was to graft together those same two rows, the first and the last, as invisibly as possible. There's poetry in that, yes?

By my calculations, the shawl contains 698,888 stitches, not counting any of the tinking and reworking that inevitably became necessary from time to time along the way. Those periods of retrenchment (for lack of a better word) would no doubt place the total number of knitted stitches at well over 700,000.

The yarn that I used was Gossamer CashSilk, with Addi Turbo circular needles in US size 000 (1.5 mm). This buttery soft and mind-bogglingly fine-spun fiber (70% cashmere, 30% silk) can be purchased direct from the designer's website in an ever expanding range of light and dark colors. I am HOOKED on it, and have turned to it for several of Sharon's designs. This time I chose the yummy rich shade of dark red called Burgundy. Photographs just don't do it justice.

Each demure little 25 g skein of the CashSilk contains 725 m. I used up 7 of these, and it was my brother who pointed out to me that we are talking about OVER THREE MILES of yarn in a single piece of lace fabric.

But enough statistics. This shawl was a grand adventure and no mistake. My various milestones, as well as the trials and tribulations, were amply documented by the messages and WIP photos posted by me to the Heirloom Knitting Yahoo Group. I go by "Miriam in S Indiana" on that forum, for readers who may be curious and find that they can spare the diligence and effort required to investigate further, but I would not even want to try to recreate the whole saga in detail.

Instead, I will give the Princess her due in this venue by recapping a few particularly choice excerpts from the final stages and the aftermath of completing this vast project. Perhaps they should each have a separate post.