Lace knitting: the Shawl Saga

This picture should be titled 'I Love My Cat and Will Not Kill Him'. He knows this, of course. He also knows that he is a black cat and I am knitting a very delicate white shawl. If he did not kill mice for me and keep my feet warm at night I would wang his little kitty head against a wall.

Sigh.

As you can see, around the cat, I have been working on my shawl. I've progressed to the last panel of lace that forms the center of the triangle. It sits right around the top of the shoulders and the base of the neck.

I'm not sure I like it. The lace is formed by an alternating K3tog (knit 3 together), k1 p1 k1 into the next stitch, row and plain knit rows. Because of the decreases you end up knitting the 3 (k1 p1 k1) stitches on the next pass. The resulting lace looks a bit like moss stitch with holes in it. It does not lay flat, because it's kinda fancy garter stitch.

It's not an amazingly difficult pattern, it's just time consuming. The K3tog's are touchy and you have to be really careful to not lose a stitch or split the yarn or only knit 2 out of 3. (Of course some of this is my fault for knitting super slippery alpaca lace weight yarn on super slippery Addi Turbo's. But i will over look that.)

I just don't know if I like the look of it. It looks OK in the magazine picture, but is somewhat distorted by the drape of the garment. So I'm left with questions. How will it look in real life once it's knitted up? How will it look once it's blocked? If it's ugly will my hair be long enough to cover it? Well, probably, my hair goes past my waist. Will it look good enough to not need long hair?

And most importantly, can I keep my cat off it long enough to even answer these and other facinating questions?

(Que dramatic music.)

I'm making progress!

See how far I've gotten.

Ok, it's not blocked so it's not nearly as impressive as it could be, but it's still progress.

This is how the pattern works. You cast on 339 stitches and knit your way up and in, then you come back and pick up sticthes to knit the border. So basically you start in the middle. The shawl itself has 4 kinds of lace pannels interspersed with reverse stockinette stitch.

I've done two of the different kinds of lace. Here's a close up. If you go by the charts I have done A, B and C, and just finished row 57. On the big picture you can see where I've put red dots on the rows I've finished. I mark up most of my patterns eventually which is why I work from photocopies alot.

In the original pattern the rows of eyelet lace at the bottom and the rows of eyelet lace at the top would be in a grey-beige color. The feather and fan lace block in the middle would be in dark grey at the bottom shading to light grey at the top. So if you think about it I've done a fair swack of knitting.

I like to think about it that way. I can't wait to see how much it's going to stretch out once it's blocked. The lace is working up so fine I wonder if it'll fit through a wedding ring?