Saturday, June 13, 2009

Gauge swatch? Why no, why do you ask?

I'm inside and my camera is (I think) out in the car. In other words, no pictures even though I took some!

I have two skeins of this mystery two strand (I thought) lace weight yarn in the stash. Quietly sitting there next to a skein of saketelli (sp?) laceweight. Plain off white/natural color. So I experimented with some Wilton's frosting colors and overdye the yarn. I was hoping for a nice pale aqua. But Wilton's dyes sometimes separate - which happened here. Started turning green. So I try adding some navy to offset. And got some cool small purple areas. But of course even though they were in the same pot, the two skeins were slightly different colors. And being mystery skeins, of unknown yardage. So I'm happily knitting away on Susan Lawrence's new pattern Beach Glass (rav link). Using the recommended size 5 needles and I'm being a good knitter and alternating the two skeins. Unknown yardage and different colors again.

The pattern has two repeats of the feather and fan section followed by eight repeats of the top garter lace section. I'm about section four when the little voice in my head starts talking. You know that voice. The one that starts out whispering but gradually get louder. This isn't working! The size isn't right - you better do something about this! The voice that tells us to stop knitting way before we've knit a sweater that 15 people can wear at the same time. About section five I finally stretched out the knitting to measure gauge. The pattern gauge is 22 stitches per 4 inches. My gauge? 26 stitches per 4 inches. No wonder this was looking scarf size and not shawl size - I started out five inches smaller than the pattern!

So a brief ripping and rewinding session happens. Since I alternated skeins, I was very careful to rewind as I ripped. So it worked out really well. And now I've gone out on the second limb. I had knit about 75% of the shawl and used maybe 50% of the yarn. I'm living dangerously here, but I'm trying this using only one skein. Wish me luck!

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