Crispy Noodle Knits and Quilts: Wool Peddler's Shawl

All done - and getting lots of use already, is my version of Cheryl Oberle's Wool Peddler's Shawl from her book Folk Shawls. Starting from the top down, it's knitting on easy street with rows and rows of garter stitch on a 3.75 mm circular needle. Five different colourways of Koigu PPPM were used, just like the ones I've seen before. The next colour was introduced in alternating rows with the working colour until the working colour was used up.

After getting suitably bored with knitting every stitch, the lace section was pretty exciting to begin. I started my lace when I had 331 stitches on the needle, that is, 165 sts on either side of the centre stitch. The pattern gives you a chart and written row instructions for this part. I always wish I could follow charts, but usually I find it easy to go through the row by row instructions. Not this time! With all my stitch markers in place to increase around the centre stitch, I found that the instructions omitted "sl m," which led to problems the first go-around. So this is how I re-wrote it:

On the odd row instructions where the designer says to repeat the lace pattern "from * to 1 st before next marker," I worked the next stitch as per instructed, THEN I slipped the marker and carried on ie. on row 1: K1, yo, knit to marker, *k1, yo, k3, (sl 1, k2tog, psso), k3, yo; repeat from * to 1 st before next marker, k1, sl m, yo, knit centre st, yo, sl m, repeat from * to 1 st before next marker, end k1, knit to last st, yo, k1. On even rows, the markers are slipped on either side of the purl stitches. Once that was resolved, it was back to easy street! I even had the pattern memorised by the end of the lace.

While on the last colour, I was mostly stressed about not having enough to finish the pattern repeat, and then completing eight rows of garter stitch before casting off. Since the shawl was getting bigger and bigger with each row, my estimate of how much yarn I needed for a row was pretty weak by shawl end. I did in fact guess wrong, and ended up doing only six rows before the cast off (which I did purlwise so that it would look like another row). I think it turned out alright! It has a very nice weight to it and the delicate edging just totally makes it.

Here it is pre-blocked