Galadriel's Mirror - Chart 1 Done

Susan Pandorf of Sunflower Designs has been a major talent in the lace knitting universe for some time now.  I discovered her work soon after I joined Ravelry and it was through her Evenstar and In Dreams Mystery Knit Alongs that I was introduced to The Unique Sheep.  Both of those shawls are part of a series that she has been doing inspired by The Lord of the Rings.  She's been out of the knitting world for a little while now due to some personal issues, but she is coming back and I look forward to seeing what she comes out with as she completes the series.

This pattern is part of The Fellowship of the Rings, the first set of her Lord of the Rings design series.  I've had the yarn in my stash for this project for several years now.  My Camelia Tee is now to the boring stage (endless rounds of stockinette stitch) so I decided to cast on something a little more interesting.  Susan's designs always look complicated because she does a lot of texture, with purls and twisted stitches, which results in dense charts, but they usually are not as hard as they look.  In fact this one is going to get boring as it is basically the motif (which is a thistle flower) that you see in this chart repeated over and over again.  Once I got the hang of the twisted ssk and k2tog things started going pretty quickly.

I am using Silverlode on Tinsel Toes because I felt it would be evocative of Galadriel's mirror.  I've created a spreadsheet of the stitch count and figured out my transition points and of course am weighing my skeins as I wind them and weighing them when I finish each chart.

The biggest challenge that I faced with starting this project was finding the yarn.  When I looked it up on my stash page I was surprised to discover that I had not recorded which box it was in.  I remembered where it had first been stashed, not in a box but in one of those hanging caddies, but it wasn't there so I was faced with figuring out which of the very many boxes it might be in.  I really didn't want to have to search every box that I have because I have quite a few.  In the end I was able to narrow down the search area by using some temporal data.  And once I had narrowed it down to the boxes on a single book shelf I found the yarn very quickly.  I also have some silver-lined crystal AB beads that I am using to replace the bobbles that are called for in later charts.

Project:  Galadriel's Mirror by Susan Pandorf (from The Fellowship of the Ring Series)
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Tinsel Toes in Silverlode
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)