Miss Chatelaine - Year of Lace 2010

This is the first shawl in the 2010 Year of Lace (the fourth and last shawl will be coming out next month).  I cast this on last weekend and finally finished the first repeat of the body chart.  One of the reasons that I waited on this one was because of the instructions for the construction of the shawl.  You are supposed to knit both edgings, then pick up stitches on one of them for the body and when you get to the other end you are supposed to graft the other edging to the body.  Well, frankly, grafting lace is not my idea of a good time, especially when you have 5 stitches on the edging for every 3 stitches on the body.

I pondered this shawl for a while, and watched what the other folks were doing before I decided to tackle it myself.  The first thing that I did was change how I started the edging.  You're supposed to knit a 2 stitch garter strip and then pick up stitches on the edge of that.  I just did a lace cast on.  I also added an extra repeat of the edging, bringing the row count up to 164, and cast off using a lace cast off.  The pattern called for doing the 2 garter stitch thing again.  I suppose that would have made the edge of the edging match the edging on the body of the shawl, but that really didn't matter to me.  I then picked up every other row for the body, which gave me 82 stitches, and added some extra stitches at the beginning and the end to get me up to 85 stitches - the pattern calls for 81 stitches - so I have 4 garter stitches at each edge, instead of just 2.

The yarn is Audrey,  by Schaeffer Yarn Company.  It is a light fingering/3 ply 50% merino, 50% cultivated silk blend.  It is wonderful to work with, with great stitch definition, and I love the colors.  I have really been drawn to these colors lately.  They just make me feel happy and warm and relaxed.