It's a good thing elves are immortal...

At this rate, my Evenstar Shawl might get finished before the entire species becomes extinct. Wait, maybe not.

I started strong, what with the choosing and buying of items to make the shawl. Then waiting for them to arrive is always convenient for me, since it involves me doing nothing but whining about how I can't start the project yet. Then, when all had arrived and the time came, I pounced! I pulled out my size 4 DPNs and made the called-for swatch. Yeah, I jumped up a needle size from the recommendation right away. That's how this tight knitter rolls. Oddly, the swatch came out a teeeeny bit smaller than guage. So this left me with a choice. Do I knit it on the 4's, and end up with a slightly smaller Evenstar? Or do I go up a size, and risk making a very expensive mess?

This, as always, is where things always go ugly for me. Technically, both answers are right. According to my math, making them on a size 4 would make the shawl something like 58" in diameter instead of 60". Using a size 5 will make it a little bit more than 60". Is either bad? No. Can I make this very simple decision that makes no difference to anything at all? Nope.

So here's what I have, and have had for about a month now:

More than 100$ in yarn and beads, a lovely swatch, and a beautiful project bag that is languishing with no knitting being done.

For anyone who knows that they could do better than this given the same lovely items, here's where to get them:
Evenstar pattern, by Susan Pandorf
Silk Thread II in the colorway Ravenscroft, by Blue Moon Fiber Arts
Metallic Teal Green Iris 8/0 beads from Earth Faire
and last but most definitely not least,
Gorgeous black and toile project bag from Buttermilk Cottage on Etsy

No, you can't have mine. I am getting out the size 5 needles, and I am casting on for the actual shawl tomorrow. Then I'm going to stamp my little (shuh, size 10) feet and complain that I should have used the 4's, and it still won't make a difference.

As a side note, Susan's bags are AMAZING. I have two bags and a matching case for my DPNs, and one of the bags has been used as my everyday purse for a few months now. Also, Susan the person and business owner is a lovely human being to deal with. She made my first bag as a custom order with exactly the fabrics I wanted, and in this era of nonexistant customer service, she has been accomodating, kind, and all around wonderful to do business with.

For the record and as always, I am receiving no kind of compensation for shilling talking about any item or business. But go buy a bag from Susan anyway.

Anyway, I did promise last week that there would be an update that included a Loopy Ewe order. And the order was made, sent, and received. Why am I late? I am a klutz who tried to kill myself by doing a faceplant on the ground in the garage. Fortunately, I am again walking and no longer dizzy and lacking in focus... well, no more than usual.

So here are the lovelies from the Loopy Ewe:

Handmaiden Sea Sock in Topaz, Malabrigo in Aguas, and String Theory Caper in Periwinkle. They are all lovely and will make beautiful socks. Yes, I am going to make socks out of them. Yes, I think that would be considered a crime in some countries. In this house, though, we call it 'YAY, SOCKS!'

Shipwreck!

OMG, look, it' me! It's a good thing I don't blog for a living, I'd be broke. School has been nutty as ever, but I have no complaints. Amazing, no?

What I have is knitting. Yes, knitting. Since my last blog post, I recieved my first gradience set from the Unique Sheep:

It's the Eos base, colorway Jack's Beach. It took about three weeks between order and receiving it, so order early, but it's well worth a little wait if it isn't available in your local LYS. Eos is 50% Merino, 50% tussah silk, and it's absolutely wonderful. Given the color options, I think the prices are quite reasonable. It's definitely a luxury, though.

I proceeded to knit it into a shipwreck shawl, complete with eight thousand beads pre-strung onto the yarn.

Yes, I'm three-giant-pictures proud of it. Those beads took hours of stringing, and hours of sliding beads further down the yarn, and slowed the actual knitting quite a bit. I'm OCD enough that I did not string the beads in a random way, I put a bead on every third YO in the netting. I'm very pleased with how it turned out. For the edge, I put a bead on every single YO in the next-to-last row, to add some extra weight. These beads rolled up nicely in the edge, and I love every single thing about them.

For the actual knitting, I started out on size three (3.25 mm) DPNs, mostly because I did not have size fours (3.75 mm). Before starting the madeira lace, I switched to my circular, and at every needle switch, I used one needle size smaller than called for. This turned out quite well for me, because I was using lace yarn, and only had about 1250 yards of it; I knitted one less row of the netting than the pattern called for, and only have a few extra yards. This taught me something very important about this pattern. I was using a lace bind off, and that combined with the fact that the next to last row increases to 1100-ish stitches meant that the last two rows took a TON of yarn. I was convinced I had enough to finish the called for 58th row of netting, but didn't want to take ny chances that I would be frustrated. In the end, I was so relieved that I hadn't done that last row, I could have cried. Also, I was that sick of k2tog, yo netting that I could have cried anyway.

The madeira lace was an enormous pain, and there are a few issues with the madeira lace pattern, so before you go knitting this pattern, look up the fixes!

Curlycat's explanation for the beginning of row 16
Nurse Ratchknit's fix for rows 30 and 31