kniteracy | Laminaria

Laminaria, complete but not yet blocked
Sorry about the blurriness of the photo: I am not comfortable standing on a chair to photograph big things at the moment, so had to just hold the camera up and hope. The edges look ruffly now, but the shawl actually blocks into points.

Detail of primary lace pattern and edging
Including several of those creepy faces that made me want ot knit this in the first place!

Closer detail of edging and creepy faces
They all look a little different. ;-)

Ravelry Project page for this project

Was it hard? No, but I wouldn't have said that about this project even five years ago. In fact, it was dead easy, so easy that I found the patterns extremely easy to memorise. This became train knitting. In fact, I finished the knitting on a train this afternoon and cast off this evening in front of the television. :-)

I suppose if I'd been interested in knitted lace five years ago, I could have got up to speed on lace. But I only really became interested in lace when I first saw Victorian Lace Today. Something about the colours they chose in that book and the realisation that, duh, lace doesn't have to be made out of white cotton or mohair and it's not all about doilies and tablecloths made me change the way I thought about lace. It suddenly became interesting, and I started adding lace to socks, made some simple lace scarves, a blue alpaca neckwarmer. This is my first large scale lace project. I had 629 live stitches on the needle before I was done.

For you experienced lace knitters, yes, Laminaria is a walk in the park. It's very simple, very repetitive, you don't have to think much about the increases.

The plan is to block it tomorrow morning, but I've got to take into account my current state. It might take a while to work up the energy, and it might take a long time to pull the points out, given that I'll have to bend over something. Or I could just wait and get somebody to help me block it at some point in the amorphous future. I definitely want to wear it to class on Monday, though. It is deceptively light, and very warm. In the sunlight, the colour looks like, well, sunlight on grass.