knitelly

Don't you just love bank holiday weekends? It's been a week of late nights for me, and much as I enjoy going out, it's been glorious to spend three days relaxing at home.

Sorry for not pinning the shawl out for these photos, but the light was a bit hit-and-miss today, and I had to grab the opportunity as soon as it presented itself!

So this is where I am with the melon shawl from VLT. After several days ignoring it, hoping it would miraculously grow in width and length, I took my head out of the sand, made some basic yardage calculations, added a few more repeats to the centre panel, and then - gulp - cut the yarn and started on the border.

But the combination of garter stitch and sea silk was too clumsy, so after only a few repeats I ripped the border out, and replaced it with the smaller Vandyke edging. This border is used in quite a few of the patterns in VLT, knits up quickly, looks pretty and so far I am very, very pleased with it.

The Vandyke is a 12-row repeat, rather than the original 8-row border, so some adjustment had to be made on the corner. It does actually look better when pinned out, so I'm trusting in the miracle of blocking. What I don't like, in fact what I really, really DISlike is the final repeat which doesn't get tied by the melon stitch. I don't understand why the pattern specifies this, but I think it looks kinda ugly.

Also raining on my parade is the fact that with a smaller border, I'm going to have quite a lot of yarn left. So, I'm in half a mind to undo the edging and add another column of faggoting to make the shawl wider. But then, I'm not sure it wouldn't spoil the pattern. Oh, what to do, what to do?

It was another fab I Knit London meet this week, this time at the Albert public house in Victoria. I was surprised by how many turned up despite the incessant rain. There was also a strong US contingent, and there was a lot of laughing at the end of the evening with some healthy debate on the different merits of UK and US telly. [As an aside, I've just finished season 3 of the Gilmore Girls on DVD, and am SO unhappy about Jess and Rory splitting up *sob*, I actually don't want to watch season 4!] A few days before, I'd cast on Tahoe in DB's Cathay, as an antidote to all this lace, and the mindless stocking stitch makes it the perfect project for pub knitting.

Following an unfortunate incident on our splendid public transport [ha], the Hedera socks have bitten the dust - just as I had memorised the pattern too! I'd only got as far as the end of the first cuff, so there is still the majority of the skein left for some other project, but for now, it goes into stash. Which leaves time for a new sock project. Oh wait, I ALREADY HAVE two on the needles. [I could have done with a sock at the cinema the other night - the new Bourne film, the beautiful locations, action scenes, the car chases, visually it's all fabulous, but even for the standards of the genre, there was no story at all. Really. At all. ]

Talking of IKL, the boys are throwing a party next Sunday at the Vauxhall Griffin to celebrate the shop's first anniversary and it sounds like fun, hope to see you there.