Try, try again

Looking at someone’s very fine-weight lacework on their blog recently caused a real pang; I missed that. The fingering weight I usually work with makes lovely shawls and fairly practical ones: you can absent-mindedly throw your purse strap over your shoulder and not freak out that you just shredded a hundred hours’ worth of work. For me, the 5 to 5.5 mm needle sizes I use with those are by far the most comfortable in my hands, working them hour by hour; the smaller ones with the finer yarns require much more frequent breaks, and for my eyes, too.

And yet… There’s nothing in knitting quite as satisfying to me as creating with a very fine laceweight. Knowing how ethereal and airy it’s going to look when you’re done. Picturing the recipient looking absolutely glorious, wearing just the slightest warmth against the breeze on a spring day full of the opening-up of the earth to all its new possibilities.  (Okay, cue Bambi stepping out of the forest, turn on some Mozart…)

And so I found myself reaching for the baby alpaca/silk laceweight at Stitches at Ellen’s HalfPint Farm‘s booth. That was the light blue I wanted. Alpaca’s a bit sturdier than wool, given that the fibers are twice the length, to answer part of the practicality argument, and it was so soft. And the spinning was just right: four tiny plies rather than two, spun not so tight as to be too wiry like some alpaca laceweights are, not so loose that it would fray easily. Just the right balance.

I had a stitch in mind that I’d somehow never tried before that I wanted to use it with, and I swatched it first on Amanda‘s merino I’d bought recently. I’m glad I did. I liked it enough that that swatch will keep going till it’s a scarf, but I found it fiddly enough that I don’t want to do it in the alpaca, which does have just enough energy to it that it would be hard in that stitch to see where I am in the pattern. Mismatch alert. Not those two together. Not for me, anyway, not now.

This after spending a few hours–actually, a couple of days–hashing out a whole shawl pattern, working out the details, figuring it out visually, writing the rough ideas down, working out the stitch counts. I’ll knit that one later–just not in that particular laceweight.

I had more ideas. I cast on. But it didn’t matter what plans I had, somehow I cast on the wrong number and didn’t notice till a fair bit along. (I *always* count constantly when I’m trying something new! But I did not this time.) When it hit me, I sat there going, why is this being so hard? I’ve made dozens and dozens of shawls, I don’t make silly mistakes like adding 22 with 21 and getting 53 on paper, I just don’t!

I did. Rip.

The end result is that by the time I got really going at last, I had spent enough time at it to let a different way of seeing the problem percolate through. I found, to my surprise, I was glad my other ideas hadn’t stayed on the needles. I knew exactly what I wanted, I knew exactly why it should be what it was turning into now, and I knew that nothing else would have done as good a job of conveying what I wanted the stitches to represent. I’d tell you more, but then the person it’s going to would guess, and you’re going to have to wait until they get to find out.

But I gotta tell you, it feels good to know that this time, it’s coming out exactly the way it was meant to all along.

I’m writing this on a hands-and-eyes break from it, but I can’t wait to get back to it.