Before and After

I can't remember if I've written about it here, but I've been wanting to figure out how triangular, neck-down shawls work. I've only made one neck-down shawl (the flower basket shawl, like everyone else on the planet... or, um, every other knitter), and the interaction between the increases and the stitch pattern seemed like magic--where did the increases go, so the pattern wasn't messed up? (I knit it during a week of all-day training for my previous job... it's possible that I'd have understood if I'd been paying more attention).

So I bought Knitting Lace Triangles, and then a book-related miracle occurred, and my mom found Knitting Lace through her volunteer work as a book sorter for her local library book sale. (We nearly got it for $4, but my mom had a burst of honesty and told them it was too valuable to sell as a regular book, so they set it aside for the rare book room and I despaired. But, it turns out that they don't price even rare books at the full market price so it turned out to be moderately expensive, not crazy expensive, and she was able to buy it for me after all. Victory!)

Anyway... Knitting Lace pointed out that all you need to shape lace is an increase without a decrease or decrease without an increase (which meant I could use the increases that were already in the stitch pattern, but not work the corresponding decrease--you'd think this would have occurred to me before but it hadn't)... and suddenly I understood and picked a stitch pattern from Knitting Lace and drew pictures and knit like a maniac and ta-da!


Pre-blocking



Pre-blocking



Blocked



Blocked

I'm not sure how well they show up, but there are beads at the points--one orange and two green ones, since I didn't have enough of either color.

(The yarn about 350 yards of Anne from Schaefer, and I used a size 6 needle.)