Lizzie, why you play me like that?

Progress on the Knitter's Almanac front.

I'm 8 rounds in to the January sweater. Last night, I cast off the baby pad. This morning I moved on to the second February project, which is a lace shawl.

Oh, shawl... you shall be conquered yet.

Elizabeth Zimmerman is... how shall we say it... a litle vague? After writing about Shetland wool and how it comes in many different sizes, she then offers up a pattern for a shawl, calling for 10 oz of Shetland wool that knits to 4 stitches to the inch when knit loosely on size 5-8 needles.

A-what now?

Could she possibly be more vague?!

I poked around online a bit and came up with nothing, so I posted for help on the LiveJournal knitting community and Cynthia pointed me to Ravelry (dur) where a woman had made several different versions of the same shawl using lots of different yarns. Seeing that made it ok for me to not freak about the yarn so much and I started stash diving.

I pulled out some DK cotton in a very, very bright blue-green and some loverly alpaca that I didn't have enough of in one color, but I could do stripes of brown, green and purple. Neither one of those options really floated my boat, so I made my way to the office where I've stashed all my to-destash yarns. I found a cone of 80/20 merino/cashmere blend in a dk-ish 2-ply. I'd bought it a long time ago from Webs when my mom sent me a gift card for Christmas one year. It was on major-can't-pass-up markdown, so I got a cone of it. It's a very rich brown with flecks of orange and barker brown in it. I loved the color, loved the fiber, and it was on sale, so I ordered it.

And then it arrived. Hrm. It wasn't what I was expecting. It was coarser than I thought, and the plies weren't wound very tight. I was enough of a nice-yarn noob to not realize that it had been created for weaving and machine knitting. Once it's washed, it should soften up quite a bit. However, once I learned that tidbit, I wasn't really in the mood to knit with it anymore. And so it's sat in the stash for at least 3 years at this point.

When I saw it this morning, little bells went off and I knew it was going to become this shawl. I sat down with some DPNs to get started. I did a gauge swatch on 8's and it was slightly below what it called for, so I grabbed some 9's and jumped in.

It begins with a crochet cast on that has you make a loop and then pull up additional loops through that first loop and leave them on the hook. You transfer them all on to your DPNs and start knitting from there. You only start with 8 stitches. Divided up on 4 DPNs. I tell you, it is a miracle I didn't impale myself during the first 4 rounds. After that, the flailing needles settled into a square and I could carry on without risk of bodily injury. At 64 stitches, I can transfer them to a 16" circ, but I'm only at 56 so far. Close.

I need to stop at that point, though, because another vaguary of Madame Liz is that she tells you to just pick a lace pattern, make sure it's centered in the 4 panels, and start in on it. So before I can go much farther, I need to settle on a lace pattern, too. I suppose I could go a few more inches without one, but I do like the look of the sample in the book where it starts from almost the center. Thank goodness for stitch guides.

This year of the Knitter's Almanac may be my undoing.