Feeling Edgy

I will keep you in suspense no longer. I've chosen to knit Madli's Shawl from Knitted Lace of Estonia. I liked it, and it seemed like something I would actually wear. I'm using Yarn Chef's Creme Brulee wool/silk laceweight in a color called Malted, which is off-white, with tans and pinks, which gives the shawl an antiqued look. So I cast on. And I don't like the cast on. The pattern calls for a knitted-on cast-on using two strands of yarn. Mine doesn't look like the one in the book, perhaps because I kept the cast-on fairly loose to facilitate blocking. It'll just have to be a design feature. Oh, well.


I finished the lower border, so soon I'll move on to the main pattern section. I added a row of yarnovers in the middle of the garter stitch section at the top of the border, to provide a more prominent differentiation between the border and the main pattern.

The directions have you cast on and knit the lower border and the entire main body, then knit the top border separately and graft it to the rest of the shawl. My plan is to knit until I use up a whole skein. When I break out the second skein, I'll knit the upper border, so I know exactly how much yarn I have left to use to complete the shawl.

The nupps are going fine. Knitting Daily's TV show has a brief segment with Nancy Bush in which she demonstrates just how loosely to knit the stitches that form the nupp. That was extremely helpful. Here's a close-up view of the border, in which you can see the nupps more clearly:


In non-knitting news, I attended the Colonial Fair at Sr. Jr.'s school on Friday. It was the first in-school event of his middle school career. I was excited to see him out in the wild, interacting with the other creatures. I was assigned to a room that he wasn't in, but I did get to see him and visit his room. (All the colonies were assigned different rooms. The kids were given "passports" to go visit other colonies and learn about how they were founded, what their major crops were, etc.) It was a fun time. It was also nice to catch up with some parents that I rarely get to see anymore, since we don't meet up as frequently at school events.

Today was the last cyclocross race of the season, and while Sr. Jr. couldn't enter, Jr. Jr. did. It was his first official cyclocross race :) As luck would have it, there were two other boys there from his school and grade, one of whom is actually in his class. I suspect that the competition was a little fiercer because they all know each other. Jr. Jr. came in fourth, his classmate came in third, and the other boy came in fifth, so a good showing for the school.