First Lace Attempt

First of all, ohmygosh, my friend Joanna Johnson from Slate Falls Press released this GORGEOUS pattern in Knitty eMagazine a couple of weeks ago. Can we say YUM!?! And it's free! I swear Joanna, I'm not trying to be a suckup or anything, but seriously, your patterns are AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL! I could hardly wait to try it.

My girls are going to wear handmade dresses again for Easter this year, courtesy of my lovely mama. I requested sleeveless so I could try to knit them little shrugs. I even let Little Miss C pick out the yarn she wanted and found lots of patterns to choose from. One word - HA. I wanted to knit lace cardigans for them, even though I had never knit lace before. After a lot of swearing, my first one pretty much got thrown out the window. I tried to "design my own" using the foliage pattern from Joanna's pattern, and again, a big fat HA. Not this year. I decided to use the pretty turquoise yarn to make the Foliage Pattern, start to finish, as my first practice lacework piece, and put off the cardigans for next year.

This went pretty well for quite awhile. I would make a mistake every now and then, which is to be expected when learning a new technique, right? After about 8 inches though, my mistakes had piled up far too high and I couldn't keep track of where I was supposed to be any more. I cut that yarn and started from square one. First 3 rows of the lace pattern ended up being a disaster, so I ripped out the whole thing and started again. During the third attempt I messed up the number cast on, making it different than planned and also messed up really badly on the first row of lace. Time to rip it out (again) and let it sit for a bit. At least during the season 3 finale of Downton Abbey, which seriously, WHAT THE $@$%@! were they thinking!?! I decided one more time to try again last night. After all, the pattern was easy enough, (and by no means were my mess-ups the fault of the pattern writer), so I thought I would "give it a go" one more time and prove to myself that I'm not "completely daft." (See, too much Downton Abbey.) I was pleasantly surprised to see how much better it went this time, only a few mistakes here and there and I was able to catch them right away! I have loved learning how lace knitting works, with all it's little intricacies and yarnovers. It really is a beautiful way to knit. Plus, I am getting much faster! I was able to whip up this much in about 3 hours last night, so I am well on my way. Maybe I will finish it by the time spring truly is here and it can make a cute little scarf to offset my growing belly in the warmer/cool weather. Anyways, I'm rambling now. Enjoy your weekend, it's supposed to be 70 degrees here! Sounds like a good weekend for some geocaching with the kiddos....