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.

This weekend I totally surprised myself by finishing the first edging piece for my Estonian shawl. Granted, it was a long weekend, and the weather was miserable, so I had plenty of knitting time. But with so many stitches on the needles, you’d think I’d be tempted to work on other, less tedious projects… you know, ones where an hour’s effort produced visible results.

Nope. Quite the opposite: I was the lucky beneficiary of the “just one more row” instinct. One row turned into two, two rows turned into three… I couldn’t help myself; I just had to keep knitting.

And in just a few days I had a ridiculously long and skinny bit of fluff. Piled on the kitchen scale, it looks like this:

10g of fluff

Better yet, here’s the remaining yarn:

15g of yarn left!

Whew! That’s reassuring. Now I know I’ll have enough yarn to finish, without having to rip any of my swatches.

Here’s what I have yet to figure out: will it work? Will I be able to sew the edging pieces onto the body of the shawl, easing around the corners and matching the edging points to the corners, without going blind or crazy in the process? Will it block out nicely, or will some part insist on puckering or curling? Will the shawl be of reasonable size, or will it seem like an oversized scarf?

The only way to find out is to keep on going, starting with the second edging piece. With any luck, the “just one more row” drive will seize me again.

I don’t suppose it’s any surprise I’ve been dragging my heels on my Estonian shawl project. I mean, really, who looks forward to casting on 565 stitches?

lots and lots and lots of stitches

Fortunately, the traditional cast-on is a knitted cast-on. It’s a fast cast-on, especially if you transfer new stitches from the right needle to the left as I (and, according to the books I’ve read, the Estonians) do: by pointing both needles upward as you insert the left needle into the new stitch. Keep the right needle in the stitch, and you’re already in position to create the next stitch. This means you don’t have to fumble around, reinserting the right needle… way cool when you’re casting on a gazillion stitches.

You’ll notice I cast on with two strands held together. That’s another bit of Estonian tradition: it makes the edges of their shawls a tad sturdier. I used the the outside and the inside ends of my one ball of Grignasco Prezioso. It’s not my favorite way of playing with two strands at once – sometimes, keeping the two ends of the same ball from getting tangled can be a little fiddly – but it was the only sane choice in this situation; no other option would guarantee that neither strand would run short.

Next up: knitting two plain rows before starting the lace pattern. That’ll also be a sanity saver. The idea of jumping right from the cast-on into the lace pattern gives me the heebie-jeebies. Knitting a couple rows will give me a base of regular-tension stitches into which to work the lace – so much better than trying to work double decreases into the cast-on stitches.

Knitting a couple plain rows will also give me a chance to readjust my markers. The photo shows how I used a bit of waste yarn to mark off every group of 50 stitches. Smart move: eleven groups, counted at least twice each, plus another 15 stitches, lets me know I have the target total of 565. What would’ve been a smarter move, though, would’ve been to place markers every 48 or 60 stitches – that is, every 4 or 5 repeats of my 12-stitch pattern, where they’d help me establish the lace pattern correctly. Oh, well. I’ll move the markers after the two plain rows.

So: using a fast cast-on, using two ends of the same ball, working plain rows before starting the lace, and using markers to keep tabs on the cast-on count and on the pattern repeats. That’s a slew of sanity savers. I think I’ll need ’em all… after all, this is just the first edging piece. Once it’s done, I get to do it all over again.