Bee balm lace

   I just finished a lace shawl that reminds me of the common bee balm flower that grows with abundance in our Midwestern prairies.

I used the Ostrich Plume stitch pattern on page 278 of Barbara Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. It looks complicated, but it's one of the easiest lace patterns I've ever knit. Three rows out of four you knit stockinette and the lace row is easy to memorize. I added a border of 5 stitches in garter stitch to keep it from curling.
   When knitting is in progress, the lace looks pathetic. Kind friends avert their eyes and do not question one's sanity. It's lumpy.

Below you see it during the blocking process, pinned to a sheet on top of my bed. The sheet is so I can see all the pins and remove them all. I used an entire box, doubtless hundreds. Using lots of pins reduces the waviness of the edge. Unblocked, the shawl measured 4 feet by 14 inches. Blocking made it magically grow to 5 1/2 feet by 19 inches. (1.7 meters by .5 meters) Because it is so thin a yarn and open an pattern it dried in a couple of hours, even in the summer humidity.

I am looking forward to wearing it. It's going to the opera!

Knitty gritty: I used an Italian yarn, Cashwool by Baruffa in lilac. It's 100% extra fine merino with 1350 meters to 100 grams. Apparently this yarn is no longer available in the US. This particular yarn went back and forth to Costa Rica not once but twice!

Leftover satisfaction

   There is something particularly satisfying about using up yarn left over from a previous project. I've had a couple of projects lately to use up some Kauni yarn. I love its long color changes but I sometimes need to edit out particular colors.

I took the large amount left from my Maya Dreams sweater and knit a big garter stitch shawl. It's so big that I photographed it folded up.

This was perfect to knit while watching TV. (For one thing, watching TV kept my mind off how long it took to do a single row as I approached the end. An outside row was 94 inches/240 cm long as it went along two sides of the triangle. That's almost 8 feet! I have no idea how many stitches.) I didn't time it, but I'm sure it took me over two hours to cast off the edge. I cast on a few stitches and increased one stitch on each edge and two stitches at the center on every other row. It was knit garter stitch alternating two balls of yarn.
   Usually one ball was grey and the other ball was something else like green or blue or purple. I'm very happy with the way it turned out. I suppose it I get very cold I can wear both my sweater and shawl since they were knit from the same colorway and therefore match very well.
  The other Kauni I had left over was a small amount of the rainbow colorway from my Obsession Sweater.

I knit a tam because I wanted to know my gauge when combining Kauni and 2 ply jumper yarn from the Shetlands. I'm planning to use that combination on an upcoming sweater: using grey as the background for Kauni colorway EL that shades from blue to purple. So here is my Rainbow Leftovers tam. The crown is all Shetland as I was out of green in Kauni. I got the crown pattern from Knitted Tams by Mary Rowe.