Monday, August 8, 2011

The Saga of the Breeze That Wasn't

Back in mid-June, Jane Thornley introduced a new pattern for a simple wrap she called The Breeze, partly because it was a breeze to make; large needles, lightweight yarn, simple stitches. It captured everyone's interest, mine included. I had the perfect yarn for it. 

My first attempt had to be frogged, because it got so wide, with no depth, that it would have been usable only as a long skinny scarf that one winds around the neck multiple times. Armed with some hints from one of the other Ravelers, I started again, and this time it seemed to progress rather smoothly. Until I got about half done. The cable came loose from the needle, and the stitches all started to unravel; the perils of using large needles on thin yarn. I was panicky at first, but decided to try and mend it all, no easy feat with a random lace pattern. Somehow, I pulled it off. 

Finally I added the edging around the top, and bound off. But I didn't cut off the yarn, I used it to picked up stitches around the bottom to add a matching edging When it was finished, I wasn't happy with the way it looked, and decided to redo it. So I frogged back to where I had picked up stitches to start again. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying enough attention, and ended up frogging part of the top edging. Enough of it that the whole thing started to unravel. Because of the nature of the yarn, it was almost impossible to stop the unravelling, and when I finally did, much of the top few inches was lost. I tried running a lifeline at what I thought was the lowermost edge of the unraveling, but it wasn't quite evenly threaded through, so I had to really work at it till I got the cable to go straight through on one row.  Again there were a few spots that I had to repair, actually a large area, but I faked it, and it worked. I just wouldn't want anyone looking too closely at it.

The problem at this point was that all that frogging had released a lot of yarn, which promptly got tangled up. I ended up spending a day and a half untangling and rewinding before I could proceed with finishing the bottom edge, which I decided to crochet instead of knit.
Crochet Edge
 Once it was done, I realized that it was really a little longer/wider than I wanted. So I gathered about half of the neckline edge, and now it's a much better length.

 The Random Lace

1 comment :

  1. OMG, I had sooo many problems with this piece! Frogged, frogged and again. Melba also had problems. I was starting to think I should give up knitting! Thanks for sharing your experience.

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