Swallowtail Shawl: Humility

I have a tendency to take on too much. And so it was with the Swallowtail Shawl. I needed a project to take on vacation, something I could easily finish during a two week road trip. Knitters on Ravelry reported the Swallowtail Shawl was an easy, quick knit. One knitter said she finished it in eight hours. Not me. The vacation is over. The shawl is not finished and I’ve done more unknitting on this than on anything else I’ve ever knit.

I’d like to think I’ve been knitting for 50 years. After all, my aunt taught me when I was 9 or 10. But I don’t remember knitting more than a few inches then. I knit a few scarves in college, a blanket for my first born, two ponchos in the late ‘70s. I gave away my needles and yarn in the ‘90s and started all over again 4 years ago when I retired. I’ve knit a little lace but this was my first time to knit from a chart.

The pattern begins with a crocheted chain of waste yarn. Two stitches are picked up and knit for 6 rows, then the garter ridges are picked up, the chain is unzipped and the exposed stitches picked up. Simple enough. It took me 3 tries!

Clark’s Budding Lace, a simple 6 stitch, 6 row pattern, makes up the body of the shawl. The owner of my LYS suggested I knit a swatch of the pattern so I could see how it works. I didn’t. Instead, I knit at least 10 pattern repeats before I understood it well enough to identify a mistake in time to fix it. Once I finally got it, it was indeed simple, easy to see and follow. I did an extra five pattern repeats as suggested by Littleberry here so I could enjoy knitting once I finally understood what I was doing.

Onward to the Lily of the Valley border. I knew from posters on Ravelry that the nupps could be a challenge. A nupp is created by K1, yo, K1, yo, K1 in the same stitch on the right side and then purling all 5 together on the wrong side. Done correctly the five strands lay parallel to each other in a neat little button. I’d read all kinds of suggestions of how to do them, work on the cable of the needle, use a crochet hook, slip 2, knit 3 together, pass slipped 2 over or slip 3, knit 2 together, pass slipped 2 over. The bottom line is that they are just plain difficult. It is hard to grab all 5 stitches, hard to grab all 5 without picking up the yarn over that follows and there is no way I could figure out to fix an error from the next row and keep the button looking neat. If I found a mistake, and I found many, I had to unknit all the way back to the right side of the nupp and do it and everything after all over again.

I think I finally have the hang of the nupps. I’m working them just as written, stretching out the yarn in each of the K1s to give me lots of room to insert my needle when I purl 5 together. And so now I’m going to frog back to the Budding Lace and do them all over again.

Hopefully my next post will include a picture of a finished, Swallowtail Shawl.