All sewn up

By | January 30, 2012

Last Friday I finally finished binding off the second edging piece for my Estonian shawl – despite the aggravation of having three stitches get away from me and start to unravel. As luck would have it, two of ’em were nupps. When those puppies unraveled, the edging started to dissolve into a mess of long, loose, unruly strands. Less experienced lace knitters would have cried. I swore, grabbed clip-on markers and crochet hooks and other emergency repair tools, and got to work. Properly reconstructing those stitches took nearly 40 minutes… but at least I didn’t have to tink back three rows on an edging with hundreds of stitches! No pictures, sorry; my focus was on repairing the mess, not recording it.

Binding off that piece on Friday let me spend a good chunk of my weekend sewing the shawl together. The idea is that each edging piece is sewn along one short end and one long edge of the shawl, then the two pieces are sewn together at opposite corners. The trick is easing the edging around the corners, and along the long edges of the shawl (where the row gauge of the shawl differs from the stitch gauge of the edging).

Luckily, getting an edging point to match up with the first corner only required a little bit of fudging:

matches fairly nicely

But would the edging be the right length? It didn’t seem so, because the skinny bit of edging easily stretched far longer than the shawl. Even when the first edging piece was nearly sewn on, it still looked too long:

doesn’t look like it’ll match!

Ah, but wait: see the clip-on markers? The green marker is 6 stitches from the end of the shawl; the orange marker is 15 stitches from the end of the edging. Matching those bits up – 2 edging stitches to 1 shawl stitch three times, and 3 edging stitches to 1 shawl stitch three times – eases the edging halfway around the corner. And prior to the markers, the edging is eased on at a rate of 4 edging stitches to every 3 shawl stitches.

In the end… yes! It fit, with just a stitch or two of fudging:

yea!

Hours later, with all the edging sewn on, I’m quite pleased with the results. Even without being blocked or having its ends woven in, the shawl looks far more finished, far prettier than with just a plain garter-stitch border:

wrinkled, but still pretty

Now to find the time to block it… whoo hoo! I can’t wait.

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