1. I'm glad to say I did a little more on my Juno Regina weekend before last. This is a good sign, because it means for at least a few days my stress level had lightened enough that I felt up to lace knitting rather than nearly-brainless blankets in the round.
The thing is, I'm just not feeling it any more. I know it's a odd. When I started it, I was so excited about it, and so eager to start, and it was going to be so awesome. Now I look at pictures of the finished stole, and they just kind of look boring to me.
For my own project, I've reached the widest point of the diamond and it's not as wide as I wanted the stole to be. And honestly, I look at the vast expanse of flat stockinette with the occasional YO K2tog, and part of me just cringes in anticipation of the boredom.
I think I'm going to put it on waste yarn, take the needles out, and pack it up completely for a few months. I don't have any projects I want the yarn for right now. Although honestly, even if the love comes back, I think I'll want to start over with a somewhat heavier yarn, more of a heavy lace or light fingering than the thin Alpaca with a Twist Fino. It's beautiful stuff; I'm just wanting a larger piece.
2) Me, and my thing with mystery shawl knit-a-longs. If I'm really honest, the shawls that come out of them usually strike my tastes somewhere between "Meh" and "eww!" That's not to say anything bad about the designs or the designers, not at all. It's just that mystery shawl designs tend to have certain design elements that I don't care for, such as pictorial motifs done in yarn-overs on a stockinette background, or a visible periodic nature -- not necessarily a hard break between clues, but shifts were you can tell where each clue was.
And yet when I find one while it's still open, I feel compelled to sign up for it. I've at least gotten to the point where I don't feel obligated to knit it until enough clues have come out that I can tell if I like the design. (One bad burn took care of that, methinks.) But I'm still there. I think it's that fear of missing out. What if this is the one that turns out awesome and just perfect for me and I missed it? That part of my brain doesn't want to listen to the answer "Then you plunk down $8 at the end when the pattern goes on sale." After all, if it was that awesome and perfect for me, odds are I'd buy the pattern at the end of the knit-along anyway to thank/reward the designer for making it.
Oh well, at least adding another group onto my Yahoo account is harmless.
3) I am dubious about triangular shawls.
But, before I get into that, let me get into a needlessly technical discussion about the nature and function of shawls with far more thought than anyone sane has ever put into the topic. Why? Because I'm an engineer, and as scary as this is, my brain actually works this way.
Now, there are two schools of thought on what a shawl is for. One school is that it is to warm your arms, much like a light sweater, while another is that it is to keep your shoulders warm, like a vest. To complicate matters, it's not unreasonable, and yet not a given, to argue that keeping your shoulders warm keeps your arms warm in the same way that fingerless gloves really do keep your fingers warm by warming the pulse point. (I was dubious about that, too, but experiment has shown me that it does indeed work. I wouldn't have a snowball fight with only fingerless gloves, but they're quite nice in a cold office or on a brisk fall day.) However, as the shoulders are much larger than wrists, and not wrapped by a shawl as completely as a wrist is by fingerless gloves, I am unconvinced.
So personally, I'm in the shawl-to-warm-arms camp, and a triangular shawl doesn't seem like a good way to do this. The most common shape is a right-angle triangle with the hypotenous at the top edge and the right-angle point hanging down towards your butt.
Actually, I'm going to take an aside here. A lot of women don't like triangular shawls because they feel the point forms an arrow pointing to their hinder. However, that's not my experience. At least the way I perceive things, the point is more of a container that holds the eye and keeps it away from the butt. The eye follows the point down, hits the bottom, and then is drawn outwards by the border or pattern.
But that's just me.
Anyway, we've got a right triangle, with the right angle pointing at your butt, and then the narrower points are brought around to the front. This usually means that the part of the shawl covering your arms is roughly half as long the distance from hypotenuse to point (varying on the size of the lady and the shawl). This is not enough cover on my arms for me, especially since triangular shawls are often made so that the hypotenuse length matches wingspan. Make it large enough for adequate arm coverage, and there's tons of material in the back that serves little purpose except to get sat upon. Extra unused material = wasted work.
And yet some of the patterns are so pretty.
A popular construction for triangular shawls right now is this: Still imagine your right triangle with the hypotenuse at the top. Now, draw a straight line from the bottom point to the middle of the hypotenuse, so that you have two right triangles next to each other, with the right angles at the middle and top. The shawls are laid out like that, start at the center top with a few stitches to start the right angles, and then increase outwards to build the two adjoining right triangles.
So, I'm thinking of ways to alter the patterns to get more arm coverage. An obvious one is to just double it and make a square shawl with 4 component triangles. And that's certainly valid. Ironically there, though, a solid square shawl is usually folded in half and worn as a triangle.
However, you can put a split in it so it is worn like a cape. Put it between two triangles, and you'll get something shaped like a poncho, only with an opening in the front -- so consider yourself forewarned. ;) Or, I have some patterns in my queue that are build like this, but have the slit from the center to the middle of one of the square sides. It takes a little (just a little) more work to locate that, but avoids the poncho look.
The other idea I've considered is three component triangles instead of the usual two, which forms a shape like a square with one side removed. It almost looks like a sailor collar laid flat, or a faroese shawl on steroids (or maybe just LSD ^_~ ). I don't know how this would lay when worn, though.
Then another possibility is to put a wedge of material between the two triangles to form a sort of mock Faroese shaping. This is probably the most design work, and isn't suitable for all patterns. But, on some you could do some very nifty things with the back panel. For instance, putting a dragon silhouette in yarn-overs on a panel added to a Dragon Wings shawl.
Now, I've got some lace yarn laying around that I ordered for a project, but found when it arrived that it was unsuitable. I'm thinking of balling up a hank of that, and doing some doll-sized shawls to study the trade-offs of the various shapes that can be done with a triangular shawl pattern. That may seem excessively anal (and I don't think I'm prepared to deny that), but at the same time, when you consider all the nice triangular patterns out there and all the time that goes into a human-sized shawl. Well, it'd be nice to open up my possibilities and yet know beforehand how much work I need to add. Two-foot shawls are a lot faster than 5-foot ones.
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