Print o' the Wave update

This is the current state of PotW play: the border of one short side and half of one long side complete. Surprisingly, attaching the border turned out to be as simple as everyone had claimed, but it's taken a long time to get here. Long and unhappy and involving ripping.

First of all, in an attempt to increase the width of the shawl, I increased the stitch count of the border, inserting two lines of double faggotting separated by a column of stocking stitch (this [cough] expertise courtesy of much pouring over the back pages of Victorian Lace Today). After a few pattern repeats, I was satisfied that I had achieved my aim, and congratulated myself on my ability to adopt new techniques so successfully.

But with each repeat, I disliked the result more and more. The additional columns did indeed increase the width, and were perfectly nice to look at, but the hard lines broke up the soft flow of the pattern, and the wave border was too far removed from the centre panel. Time and time again, I looked at the border, tried to imagine it round the entire shawl, and fought the desire to rip.

I also revisited the library of tips I'd accumulated in my research, and of course found a post from the PotW KAL, that perfectly explained why I had more stitches in the eyelet rounds than specified in the pattern. I shoulda just read Eunny's instructions as written. Anyway, it inself, it wasn't too much of a problem, it just required some fudging, but as I got to the first corner, the required fudging on top of the ugliness of the border, well, you can probably see where I'm going with this. I ripped.

Initially, I wanted to rip right back to the centre panel, and pick up 768 border stitches again, as it was SUCH FUN the first time round. But the prospect of losing stitches at the two live ends made me too nervous, so I ripped only the border, counted the stitches on each of the sides and corners, put them on a crude diagram on a spreadsheet and calculated where adjustments were to be made. I then felt comfortable enough to restart the border.

I still wanted to increase the width, but contented myself with one column of double faggotting and an additional two stitches of of stocking stitch at the side of the wave pattern......... and I am really pleased with the result.

Now, did you all notice the large holes at the corner in the first picture? I don't know what the hell went wrong there, but I only noticed them today when I removed some scrap yarn used as a marker. I'm hoping that after blocking and draped around my shoulders, they aren't going to be that visible, otherwise, I foresee some fudging ahead...

It's a bank holiday weekend, and it has rained non-stop. Seriously. Non. Stop. But I don't care, I have the rest of the week off, yipee! That makes nine stress-free days away from the office. On Friday night, I actually fell asleep smiling.