Mayan Garden Cape - Chart 1 Done

You may recall that I had Kelly of The Unique Sheep dye up this custom colorway for me so that I could knit Kitman Figueroa's Mayan Garden semi-circular shawl as a cape.  Yesterday I cast on and today I finished the first of 15 charts.

I started out with a long garter stitch tab, knitting a long enough strip so that I could pick up 62 stitches along its length.  This gave me 68 stitches total with the 3 stitches on each end so that I could start with row 8 of the pattern.  When I got to row 25 I counted my stitches and realized that I was 4 short of the 135 stitches that I needed to do 16 repeats of the first chart.  On row 25 I did yarn overs after and before the 3 edge stitches, and on row 26 I knit into the front and purled into the back of the yarn over.  I was then ready to start with Chart 1.  The pattern is definitely for advanced knitters, with lace patterning on both right and wrong side rows.  The charts are beautiful, with wrong side rows shaded.  There is one complication with them - plain squares are purl stitches on the right side and knit stitches on the wrong side, while knit stitches are denoted by a vertical line in the box, so I had to retrain my brain a bit when I first got started.  Once again I am using my Knit Companion app on my iPad, which I find just invaluable when using charts.  There are optional bead placements indicated in the pattern and I happened to have some dark green silver lined beads in my stash that remind me of Emeralds.  You can see them glinting in the photo.  As I don't usually use stitch markers, I found them very useful for helping me keep track of where I was in the pattern.

Pattern:  Mayan Garden by Kitman Figueroa, modified to be a cape
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Luxe in custom colorway Mayan Garden
Needles:  US 4 (3.5 mm), US 5 (3.75 mm), US 6 (4 mm)