Thursday, February 18, 2010

I Love Lace

Clearly I've sucked at this whole "regular updates" thing. In my defense, Real Life interfered a little. I was sick for a week and then I was busy due to interviews (job hunting is awesome fun, really) and there wasn't enough sun to take decent photos and then I had some other lame excuse...

So, lace. I love it. And I've made some progress since my last update a month ago.

The Faux Russian Stole has been placed on hold, about a third of the way into the first center repeat:

I'm wondering if I should start over with a slightly larger needle (2.25mm or 2.5mm, rather than the current 2.0mm) since the yarn has a bit of a halo and it looks a little dense. That's a little easier to see in this close-up:

I've made a lot more progress on Aeolian. The cake of yarn is looking considerably more squashy:
I'm all the way through the Agave motif and at roughly 70% complete.
The edging is about halfway done. I like the way the nupps are turning out with this yarn. They're nicely plump, like little figs.
I've been doing 7-stitch nupps, but I'm tempted to switch to 9-stitch nupps when they show up in the edging.

It's been nearly two weeks since I've made any progress on Aeolian, because I joined the Snow Queen KAL. This is my first Pi shawl and my first mystery KAL so it's been very exciting. I'm using red 100% merino 2/28 yarn from Colourmart and black beads, so I'm thinking of this shawl as the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland. My progress through Chart D:
I've finished 7 of the 48 rows in Chart E and Chart F just got posted, so I'm a little behind. The rounds are still going fairly quickly (even with 288 stitches). Aeolian is up to 449 stitches and will have 755 before I'm done. The beading slows me down, especially the beaded decreases. Chart F of Snow Queen has a lot of beads, too, but they're all on regular knit stitches rather than decreases.