Boldness

I got Margaret Stove's new book Wrapped in Lace last week, while my partner and I were killing time before a movie. The movie (True Grit) was excellent, but I kind of wished that I didn't have to wait three hours before I got to bring the book home and read it.

There are beautiful patterns, but I don't get the impression that it's intended to be a book of patterns. There is a lot of discussion about why Stove made this or that decision about a particular design, and then the pattern itself is the proof of concept or one example of knitting ideas put to work. I think this is an interesting vibe for a knitting book to have, not least because I am usually more interested in process stories than in finished objects. The result is that it's a very encouraging and emboldening book.

In that spirit of boldness:



This is one end of THE THING that I was chattering about a few months ago. (Also, this is what lace knitting looks like if you block it, then crumple it up and shove it in the bottom of your purse and leave it there for a month.) I had felt a bit strange about deploying Shetland lace motifs in vertical stripes of different widths, but one of the lessons I took away from Margaret Stove's book is that I should get over myself and just implement the knitting ideas I have, so here we are.

I like the wickedly pointed edging I came up with.



This is what happens when you increase with kfb and decrease with k2tog at the very edge of the scallop on every row. It comes to a very sharp point and the scallops seem deeper than ones accomplished with yarn overs a few stitches in from the edge. The kfb edge looks dangerously fragile while knitting compared to the k2tog part, but it all seems to come out in the wash.

I also swatched another thing:



I noticed that most of the lace knitting I've been doing has resembled fields of blank, staring eyes. The new year is for knitting boldly, so I'm going to knit a thing that is self-consciously and evidently a field of eyes. I like how the diamond outlining the spider motif in the centre of the swatch looks like lashes. (The motif will be tiled in the border of a rectangular something. Not sure what the centre will look like just yet.)