I need to get better about posting more regularly!

The cap shawl, in Victorian Lace Today, is a huge project and is taking me forever! It doesn't help that I am in graduate school with a part-time job, but still, an hour a day--if I'm lucky--hardly makes a dent!

I started the project in early August, around the 5th. I only just finished the body of the shawl on Friday, February 13th. The complexity doesn't make this project so time consuming: it's the sheer number of stitches! It's knit in the round, so it's only knitting, knitting two together, and yarn overs--you don't even purl until the outer edge of the body! Yet towards the end, with 738 stitches, it's about an hour to knit a lace row and 45 minutes to do the knit row.

I went to Grandma's Spinning Wheel in Tucson to get help on starting the knitted-on border. Jimmy was a lot of help, and he was really friendly. You have to break the yarn, cast on eleven stitches, and start working on the chart, which I didn't have to write out because it's so much shorter. I did have to learn a new skill, which is purling backwards. It's so much faster than turning my work for each short row. It makes me want to knit/purl backwards for any short project, like scarves. I LOVE learning new skills in knitting, and I know I have a lot more to learn, which just makes me excited.

The border is going well so far. Since it's a 30-row repeat, one repeat is taking me about one hour, especially since I'm still going a bit slowly on purling backwards. The pattern is so easy, though, that it's very relaxing to work on, and soon I may be able to have a conversation while working on it. I hope that my feelings toward the border will continue to be positive and not transition to a purgatory-like state.

This shawl is going to be my wedding veil, and now that I'm so close to being finished, I cannot wait to see how it expands. My non-knitting friends and family don't understand what a knitted veil will look like (sweater on my head is what they envision). However when I go to a knitting store, everyone sees the project as I do. Regardless, it's not going to be a modern-traditional veil that is completely see-through. I will use it to cover my face when I walk down the aisle. I am NOT doing this traditional covering because I am traditional. I am insisting on covering my face because I spent so much time on the project that everyone should look at the veil for at least one minute. I'm hoping it's impressive.

More updates soon to come...I hope!

Happy knitting!