Thursday, July 02, 2009

Mermaid Lace Shawl


As promised, here is the info on my Mermaid lace shawl. First, you can see me modeling it, just ignore the "model" and enjoy the shawl. Max, the dog, snuck into the picture with me. But he's not interested in having his picture taken, just wanted to watch the squirrel raiding the bird feeder right outside the glass door. Yup, like the dogs in "Up," all you have to do is yell "squirrel!" to drive him nuts. Then he barks his brains out and drives US nuts. The squirrel ignores him, of course! And me, unless I open the door, and then he only scampers a few feet away. Anyway, back to the shawl...


So here you see the shawl blocking. It really stretched quite a bit, which made it lovely and large enough. Dan called it the "bat cape" because of how it looked on the bed! Hah. Luckily, Burt the cat has learned it's worth one of his nine lives if he disturbs something blocking on the bed. He hasn't gotten so smart about clean laundry I may happen to leave on the bed, though.

And here is a close-up of the stitches. You may or may not be able to see, there was a problem with the second, i.e. closest to the hem, lace pattern. Actually, both lace charts in the book for this shawl were wrong. The first one has been fixed and errata posted on the website. The second, not yet. It's supposed to be an 11-stitch pattern, but only rows 1 and 2 show 11 stitches, the rest show 10. So clearly, a stitch had to be added somewhere. Unfortunately, where I chose to add one, it gave the pattern a little "jog" to the side. By the time I discovered it, I had no intention of ripping it out and starting over. I don't think it'll be very noticeable.

For those of you who want the corrected pattern, you can keep watching the Mermaid shawl website for the official correction. But in the meantime, here's what worked for me in a swatch I did, with much help from my LYS owner. On the first row of the chart, add a YO at the start of the row. On the second row of the chart, do not m1 in the first, or last, YO of the row. Then follow the chart as is for the rest of the rows, and you should be good.

And if I ever decide to make this shawl again, I'll be set!

Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Hilarious, Heroic, Human Dog

I have a tale in this recent Chicken Soup for the Soul books: https://smile.amazon.com/Chicken-Soup-Soul-Hilarious-Companionship/dp/16115907...