Messing round at the Garden Party

I am now nearly finished on my garden party. Adding the border is taking quite a while though, mostly my own fault for making lots of modifications (sorry for the quality of the photo - the flash makes the yarn's subtle and lovely colour variations stand out much more than they do in real light)

I swatched for this project, because I was using cobweb weight yarn from Dee at Poshyarn and had a good hunch that it would be too fine on 3.75mm needles. I tried 2.75mm, 3mm and 3.25mm, and in the end plumped for the 3mm knitpicks.

The shawl construction on this is lovely and interesting. First you knit a thin strip of leaves. Then you work the right side, joining onto the leaves, then the left, and finally some rows all the way across before adding a knitted on border. Because I was using smaller needles, and had 1300yds of yarn available, I thought it would be good to make the shawl a little bit bigger than advertised.

There were two obvious ways to do this and I have done both. Firstly, I added 4 extra repeats of the leaf pattern (40 rows) to the centre panel. Then, correspondingly, I knit an extra 5 repeats (40 rows) of the rosebud lace pattern onto each side.

A careful stitch count showed that I had the wrong multiple of stitches for the start of the lacy lattice (I was 2 short), but this was quickly sorted out by replacing two of the p3tog with p2tog on the first row of the lattice.

Once the lacy lattice was established, it was just a question of plugging away along rows that really were getting very very long. I did some complicated maths to try and work out how much lattice I needed to knit so that I had the right number of stitches for the border, I got it wrong a couple of times, and eventually kept knitting until I had 409 stitches in total. By this point the rows were taking a very long time.

I also started the border a different place to that stated in the pattern. I just preferred the thought of starting right at the point rather than on row 9 as stated. And all this mean that I had, instead of 8 repeats of the border along each edge, 12 instead, and there was still a stitch or two to fudge. But there are always stitches to fudge when applying edging! Given that it is on average taking me just under an hour to do a repeat this is quite a bit of extra border knitting. Still, only 6 more to go so I should finish this week!