Shawl is Done

Here is the completed Irish Diamond Shawl. I started it in April and finished it last Friday night (6/8). I washed it this morning and now it's pinned out for blocking on a large terry-cloth table cover on my bed. It's 49 inches square.

It won't take long to dry with the ceiling fan blowing a nice breeze. Now all I have to worry about is making sure the cat doesn't jump up here to take a nap on it (cats like to do that, you know!) Once it's dry, I will probably spend another half hour picking off all the little white Sophie furs. Then I'll wrap it up and stick it in my moth-ball scented closet till Olmsted County Fair time (end of July), when I'm going to enter it in the knitting competition.

Here's a closer look at the pattern detail. It was worked from the center out and entirely from a chart. The design was created on the right side only and the wrong side stitches were all purled. There are approximately 130 rows.

Lace knitting looks so much more complicated that it really is. The designs are made with combinations of knitting 2 stitches together with a yarnover. The yarnover is what makes the hole and keeps an even number of stitches that makes up for knitting 2 together. By putting these combinations into different shapes, you create the lace design.

This is the chart I followed for making this shawl. The little o's are the yarnover and the slashes ( \ or / ) show the direction for knitting 2 stitches together. Plain boxes are plain stitches.

I'm very happy with how this shawl turned out. It's hard to tell what you've got when it's all bunched up on the knitting needles.