Elm Row (and extras!!)

And now for another finished object whose 15 minutes of blog fame are LONG overdue...

I grew up in and around New Haven, CT, affectionately known as the Elm City from having played host in the 1750's to the first public tree-planting program in the US, two centuries before Dutch Elm Disease effectively wiped out all the elm trees (although a precious few have apparently survived).

So when I ran across Anne Hanson's Elm Row scarf, it was an easy choice for the Deep Forest colorway of Unique Sheep Eos (50% merino wool / 50% tussah silk) that I picked up from Earthfaire, where it appears as an exclusive offering from time to time (one of many creative collaborations between Ellen and Laura and Kelly). The yarn is a marvelous mixture of spring greens with a touch of tawny golden brown, and I decided to pair it with 6/0 sparkling metallic gold-lined crystal beads. Here is my best photo of what the skein looked like before winding (which really brings out the range of cheerful colors), and another showing the wound yarn-cake with the container of beads. Notice how all of the colors from the hand-painted hank are still there, but subtly blended together. As always, click on either image to take a closer look.

To be honest, I do not have much to say about the knitting process on this one, except that the project took me ~9 months to complete (mid-March to mid-December of last year), mainly because I preferred to work on it in short, intermittent bursts rather than continuously. Anne's instructions are impeccable, as always, and I found the pattern easy to learn, albeit rather repetitive over the long haul. I placed beads in the convenient little grooves running down the center of each elm leaf: 3 beads per leaf for 7 pattern repeats at either end, and 1 bead per leaf everywhere else.

The scarf was designed to be knitted in one piece from top to bottom, but I wanted the ends to match when worn, and so set out to knit two identical pieces that would meet in the middle, with the graft neatly concealed at the back of the wearer's neck. I came up with a convenient way to ensure that two pieces coming from either direction would meet up, by ending at two different rows so that the lace pattern would align properly. Two web resources helped me hone my Kitchener technique: this Knitty editorial and this YouTube video.

The finished piece blocked out to an impressive 13 1/2” wide x 72” long!! It used up 35 g from the 50 g skein, with a total of 370 beads. Here are some pictures. The long, skinny one running down the left side shows how it looked from end to end, pinned out on a queen-sized bed. To the right is a photo of the graft (with apologies for the grid of the blocking cloth peeking through from underneath), and below are several closeup views of the lace fabric after the blocking wires were removed, two focused on the heavily beaded portion at the end of the stole, and one higher up with fewer beads. I feel thoroughly enchanted with the finished effect of this piece, because the pattern has such a rich texture and depth to it. The Eos seems to glow from within (it must be the silk content, right?), and the beads add a perfect touch of sparkle, like drops of dew glinting in the morning sun. As always, click on any image to view an enlargement.

As luck would have it, I finished the stole with leftover materials just in time for the release of Anne's follow-up design: Elm Leaves wristlets, where the same organic lace motif appears as a dainty ruffle dangling from a ribbed cuff. I added 3 beads per leaf to match the ends of the stole, and voilà.

Each cuff needed only a short time to knit, never mind the fact that I took a rather sizable break in between the two, but let me say that 4” is an awful lot of ribbing with lace-weight yarn and 2.75 mm needles... These are definitely meant more as decorative accessories than strictly functional garments, but I still find them surprisingly warm to wear. They will complement the stole beautifully. :-)

Unst Stole: Inching Forward

The Unst Stole by Sharon Miller (Project #7 in Heirloom Knitting) is currently my longest-standing WIP, and after 2+ years I am eager to finish it up as soon as I possibly can. But, as Treebeard would say, Let's not be hasty... It's not really up to me anyway. This project insists on setting its own pace, because it is incredibly painstaking, and anytime I try to rush, or work on it under less-than-perfect lighting conditions, or when I am tired and/or not fully alert, I always live to regret it. So, frustrating though it may be, I have learned and must continually remind myself that slow-and-steady is the ONLY way to make any real progress. It will all be worth it in the end.

Fortunately, I have managed to devote quite a bit of time to the Unst lately, so there are some very encouraging results, although my hope (wish??) from this earlier blog post that it might actually be done by the end of summer will almost certainly prove to have been overly optimistic. By the end of the year is more like it, or maybe before the snow flies. We'll see. At any rate, the good news is that I can now report (with pictures!!) on all three sections of the pattern: center, borders, and edging.

I. Center
It took me three tries with two embarrassingly long hiatuses in between to get through the 476 rows of my modified center pattern, but on May 1st I finally reached that point. I did a total of 9 repeats, beginning and ending with a framing band of mirrored ferns and alternating in the middle between the original pattern and an adaptation of the Shetland Twins motif. Here's an old picture of the bottom frame and the first several repeats, plus a new one showing the entire center. Click on either thumbnail to get a closer look.

II. Borders
The Unst borders have always been my favorite part of Sharon Miller's design. There is something about the delicate lace trellis with its different diamond motifs, each of which is distinct and yet beautifully harmonized with the others, that I find utterly captivating. My one complaint is that the 136 rows of the original charts are over too quickly. That's not a lot of yardage, especially at the tiny gauge that I get with Gossamer CashSilk and 1.5 mm (US 000) needles. So for my stole I decided to double the length of both border panels, which should dramatically showcase the trellis/diamond pattern when the piece is worn.

Below are three photos to illustrate exactly what I did, since I did not simply repeat the charts as written. The top photo shows the frame separating the border from the center below it, and the beginning of the first border panel. In the lower left you can see how it looked when both charts were complete (June 6th). According to the original design, the body of the shawl would have stopped there. Note that there are 5 full diamonds in the trellis, each containing a different pattern (ABCDE), with half-diamonds above and below. I replaced the motif in rows 1-11 (i.e. the bottom half-diamond) with the more symmetrical/rounded one found on p. 218 of HK, and also wrote out a chart to complete the half-diamond at the top (F), which enabled me to continue the trellis with the original series of diamond motifs in reverse order: ABCDE-F-EDCBA, ending with the substituted 11 rows once again. The result is perfectly mirrored and balances nicely. I finished the 1st border panel on June 18th, and was amazed at how effortlessly my two-year-old provisional cast-on allowed itself to be unraveled so that I could start the 2nd identical panel, which I FINALLY finished on July 17th, bringing the stole to 70% completion, with only the edging left to round the whole thing off. As always, click on any of these pictures to get a closer view. I recommend this for the largest one in particular, which does not show up very well on a small scale.

III. Edging
Make no mistake: the edging may feel like an afterthought to the body of the stole, but it is a MAJOR undertaking all by itself, representing 30% (i.e. nearly 1/3!!) of the stitch-count for the project as a whole. The original Unst stole edging with its boxy squares in garter-stitch has always struck me as rather clunky, so I went hunting through Heirloom Knitting again and chose a more delicate pattern that seemed to strike just the right note. It is called the Queen’s Lace Edging (HK, p. 129) and fortunately has the same 20-row repeat as the original. It already includes a strip of faggotting along the inner edge, but I decided to incorporate the spider-hole insert from the original design as well.

A kind friend on Ravelry helped me do the math, which came out to a satisfyingly even total of 150 points: 20 across each of the short sides and 55 up/down the long sides, with sufficient ease before and after each corner to make the turns and still lie flat. The same Ravelry friend also advised me to go ahead and pick up stitches all the way around the stole on a long circular needle — 1420 of them, to be exact — to which the edging could then be attached. This took the better part of a day and was an ENORMOUS headache at the time (I won't pretend otherwise), but all that work up-front turned out to be a terrific investment. The Big Win was that it enabled me to double-check the spacing and stitch-counts and make minor adjustments in advance, rather than trying to do this on-the-fly and quite possibly having to rip out portions of the lace itself if something went awry. Now that I have all the stitches neatly held in reserve with markers at intervals to help me count, I no longer have to worry about whether the spacing will come out right and can therefore concentrate on the actual knitting, which poses enough of a challenge all by itself.

This third and final series of photos contains a close-up of the first 3 edging points, a wide shot of the entire stole, showing all the stitches bunched up on the circular needle with markers every 20 stitches along the edges and every 10 stitches near the corners, and finally my most recent picture showing the first *10* edging points (= halfway across the first short side).

The Queen's Lace is a 20-row repeat, as I mentioned, and the spider-hole insert is a 6-row repeat, so they line up together only occasionally (i.e. once after 1.5 repeats of the main pattern and again after 3 full ones). It's intricate and fiddly, with the added complication of working left-handed (chart dyslexia, anyone?). I think there's just a learning-curve and that it will speed up once I get the hang of how everything fits together. But I've been at it for several weeks now and still haven't turned the 1st corner, because I kept having to rip out bits. Two steps forward, one step back. Yesterday after yet another minor setback, I did manage to knit three or four points in a row without mishap, so maybe it will finally start to go more quickly from now on. That would certainly be nice, because at the rate I've been going so far, I estimate that it would take another 8 MONTHS or more to finish. Sigh. Clearly, no matter what, this edging is going to be with me for quite a while. Slow and steady, slow and steady, slow and steady...

Portrait of the Knitter as a Middle-Aged Woman

My good friend Viki took this photo of me not long ago at a church gathering, where we sat outdoors on a glorious spring afternoon enjoying food and fellowship together. After the meal I got out my knitting, of course, and I have only to look at the picture to feel a wave of peace & contentment spreading over me, as it did on that day. I share it with Viki's gracious permission.

P.S. Note the dpn's in my hand. Not socks, though... I was working on an elegant pair of beaded cashmere gloves, about which there will be more to say on a later occasion in what I hope will be the not-too-distant future.