Update (Feb. 16): As Isabelle and others have noticed, there are mistakes in the pattern. Fortunately, Mairi has written corrections on her Ravelry page.
I just realised that I’m long overdue for an update on this project. The pattern is the Square Medallion Shawl from The Gossamer Webs Design Collection: Three Orenburg Shawls to Knit. I was starting to despair of this shawl ever being finished.
I started knitting this shawl in linen and realised that linen isn’ t stretchy enough for Orenburg shawl construction, although it would have been fine for a Niebling doily. So I ripped it out and started over, using a lace-weight off-white wool (Botany Bay, probably a knitting machine yarn).
Then I found a hole:
It was too large to ignore, so I ripped back 60 rows. That was painful. The wool was so springy that picking up yarn-overs proved tricky. In the photo below I ran a 1.5 mm circular needle through the stitches. Even working under a magnifying glass I still ended up with half the stitches from one row and the other half on another row.
After ripping out thousands of stitches (60×200 rows or so), I put away the project for a while. I resumed it after the pain of ripping out all those stitches had faded.
Have you tired of my knitting posts yet? 🙂 I was housebound for two weeks, so there wasn’t a lot to photograph. Now I’m back at work, with less time to knit.
