The Crown Prince of Greenwich - officially my first successfully finished project of 2009!The pattern is the Crown Prince Square Shawl from Knitted Lace of Estonia (I do like this book). There is an error in one of the charts though so do check the errata on the Interweave site if you are going to knit this one.
When I initially looked at the pattern I thought it might be a dull knit as there is so much repetition -- apart from the edging the pattern is just two motifs repeated over and over again.
How wrong I was. I loved this nupp laden knitting. It held my interest and I was never bored.
Not even when I had to rip back 20 rows in the main body.
It was the usual story. I spotted a mistake about 3 rows after making it but managed to convince myself it wasn't 'too noticeable' and 'could be fixed by blocking'.
10 rows later I wasn't quite as sure but thought - maybe blocking and some needle magic will fix it. 20 rows later I knew I was kidding myself.
I attempted to drop just the affected stitches and repair -- but as you can see from these photos that left some VERY loose stitches. Attempts to take up the slackness in surrounding stitches failed -- nupps are not so easily manipulated!!!So, I bit the bullet and pulled the needles out and ripped back the full 20 rows.
Sigh.I don't really mind frogging but I do wish I wouldn't delude myself for QUITE so long.
After that it was smooth sailing.
I knit the shawl with Jaggerspun Zephyr in a cream colour -- mostly because I had enough of that in the stash! I used two full skeins for the body of the shawl, and 30 gms of a third skein for the edging.
The pattern as designed as the edging cast on and knit separately in two pieces and then stitched to the body.
I really couldn't face the idea of that, so I wimped out and picked up stitches all around the body (in the same ratio that the pattern uses for attaching the edging to the body) and knit it in the 'modern' (as Nancy Bush calls it) way. I used a very simple 12 stitch repeat edging, not too dissimilar to the pattern edging but without the nupps -- because you can have too much of a good thing!
The shawl was knit on 3.75mm needles.
Unblocked size 35"x35".
Blocked size 53"x 53".
