While I'm happy with the finished project, I did not enjoy knitting Jared Flood's Bridgewater pattern as much as I would have hoped. Both the garter stitch center square and the fiddly knitted-on edging mostly made me feel I just wanted to be done with it already. I only really enjoyed the middle part, the Horseshoe lace pattern, which was no more than 25% of the knitting time, if even that. The knitted-on edging took the most time per amount of yarn, and after I'd calculated that with my normal knitting speed it would take at least a week to complete, I decided to finish it in a knitting marathon this weekend, just to be over with it and able to move on to other things (if I left this brewing while starting new projects, I would never pick it up again). So, yesterday I spent the majority of my waking hours working on the last half of the edging, and finally finished it around 10 pm. Never before have I been so exhausted from knitting! (I calculated that if I'd knitted this whole shawl full-time like yesterday, it would have taken me about a week to complete. If I were to knit something like this for money and have a decent hourly wage, this shawl would have to cost several hundreds of Euros.)
I did not make any intentional modifications to the pattern, but there is an unintentional modification (I don't call them mistakes) where I systematically knit the stitches on the wrong side of the edging that should have been purled. I was so far into the edging when I finally noticed this mis... er, modification, that there was no way I'd rip the whole thing, so I decided to repeat the same thing for the rest of the edging. It looks fine to me, so I don't really mind. If the big picture looks good, I don't have a problem with details such as that.
I did enjoy the yarn, madelinetosh tosh lace, quite a bit, even though on metal needles it was a bit slippery. I bought the yarn from a craft fair recently specifically for this project, and I think it was a good yarn-pattern match. I'd love to work with this yarn again, but not on this pattern, though. I think one go at Bridgewater was enough for me! I'm thinking Jared's new Leaves of Grass shawl pattern will be more to my taste, since it reminds me of the construction of Girasole, but I have a different yarn planned for that one. However, in the year 2012 I seriously plan to knit 12 shawls, so there will probably be several possibilities for working with tosh lace again. I'm thinking maybe the Briar colorway, which looks very pretty in pictures. The colorway I used on Bridgewater is called Glazed Pecan.
The Ravelry project page
What a long project! Magnifique!
ReplyDeleteBeautiful...Beautiful...
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean about this pattern. I'm making a Bridgewater in a light worsted weight to use as a blanket, and about a quarter of the way through the knitted-on edging I realized I was going to run out of yarn. It's been languishing for a month or two since then because I just can't muster up the energy to rip out a repeat of the horseshoe lace and start the edging over again. Yours turned out beautifully though.
ReplyDeleteIt sure looks like a lot of work and the result is beautiful! The color is very nice. I would love to knit with that yarn in 2012! Congratulations for finishing it before casting on for something new! Merry Christmas!
ReplyDeleteI'm such a fan of your work on Ravelry but somehow seldom get over here -- lovely photography from you as usual. But great "notes" and I appreciate the candid explanation of the knitting of this -- on my "wish list" but will prepare myself for the boring parts!
ReplyDeleteKatie, that sounds terrible! I have to say I probably would have given up and ripped the whole thing at that point, because the idea of restarting the edging would have been too much to bear.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words, everyone!