How I came to love lace

Looking back over the last few months of spotty blog posts I've done here I see that I haven't chronicled a lot of my progress as I went from just knowing the knit and purl stitches, to being an obsessive lace knitter, so I thought I'd play catch up a little.

Along the way I learned entrelac, sock knitting, and cable knitting and learned basic shawl construction. I've seen on Ravelry that a lot of people are doing 11 shawls for 2011 and many did 10 shawls for 2010 so I was surprised when I counted and realized I think I've already done nine shawls this year! O_O Many of them are quite small though. One of the first that I did was the famous Citron. I used Noro Sekku, and although it was a bit of a headache (cobweb weight yarn with 500+ stitches on the needles at the end) it was gorgeous and is one of my joys.

See those stitches? They are tiny. I think being snowed in way the only way I did the whole thing in a week!

I also made a Multnomah shawl, but I didn't take a good photo of it at the time so I will wait till I can get that one in direct sunlight. I used Crazy Zauberball in "Tropical Fish," a crazy rainbow colorway, for that one.

Around that time, in February or March, I began to realize that what I really love are lace patterns. I get this tingly feeling in my brain when I look at them. I love intricate, complicated patterns especially. I made a sweater (I still have to stitch the pieces together but the knitting is done) with an elaborate lace pattern and realized: All you have to do, is follow the directions. It's like a computer program or a recipe. The information goes into your eyes and out your hands, and then you have something beautiful. The process of blocking items -- soaking them and pinning them out to dry -- makes the design set in a beautiful way. I adore lace. Utterly. Especially in heavier-than-lace yarns. I am pretty much expecting this will form most of my projects in the future, because it's what excites me the most.

A simple pattern that was easy to memorize was the Morning Frost wrap, which I did in Stitch Nation's Bamboo Ewe, the Beach Glass colorway. I really love it for reasons I can't completely explain, it just scratches the "blue" part of my brain just right.

And another I did in that brand of yarn, the Mercury colorway, was the Summer Flies shawl. This is such a wonderful pattern! It only took about 4 days, and I remember knitting it while I was anxious about the horrible situation in Japan this March, unable to concentrate on anything else. As for the shawl, though, it only takes a couple of skeins of this yarn and it changes pattern every couple dozen rows so it is always interesting.



Embarrassingly, I still have a lot more to post, but I will leave these for here now and upload more tomorrow. I do want to have shawls in every color I would wear, so I can have something to put over summer sundresses when freezing cold air conditioning does battle with the heat.

I still have a lot to learn, in lace. I haven't done "nupps" or attached beads and I haven't tackled Estonian lace. I prefer fingering, sport and even worsted weight yarns, though I like laceweight and cobweb well enough. This is where the whole "art" part of knitting takes hold of me and where I realize that it has a lot more potential for me than being able to make hats and scarves for the winter.