Magical Mystery Shawl

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Originally uploaded by sonnetstitches

This is two colorways of Noro Silk Garden Lite. The dilemma: My opinion is that the best thing to do with any Noro yarn is usually entrelac. My opinion is also that long swathes of entrelac can be tedious to knit. To solve my problem, I decided to pretend I was a little kid with a huge box of crayons and a giant piece of graph paper. When I became hopelessly bored with garter-stitch entrelac, I'd throw in a cable, a lace square, some bobbles for embroidering later, stockinette or reverse stockinette, etc.

This was an adequate solution -- for awhile. As you can see, I made another thrilling discovery: what else looks really cool in two colorways of Noro but is even MORE tedious to knit than garter stitch entrelac? If you guessed applied twisted I-cord edging, you win the prize. This shawl took me more than a year to complete because it spent most of its edging cycle in the bottom of a dark drawer in the basement where my stash lives while I occasionally tapped my wand and hoped the edging would knit itself like a stack of House Elf hats.

No such luck. In fact, even the less-than-astute observer will note obvious signs of impatience in the last stretch of applied I-cord edging. To be fair, however, part of that had to do with yarn shortage. There are about twice as many free I-cord fringe loops on one end than there are on the other, too. I had barely enough left with which to do the planned embroidery.

I was envisioning more buttons. However, my button stash appears to have made itself helpful by taking a vacation into storage to avoid getting spilled on the floor by a cat. This is all well and good, save that it forgot to leave me its forwarding address.

The idea is that when you toss the wrap around your shoulders, it's easy to use a loop of the attached twisted I-cord as a buttonhole for one of the larger buttons, thus alleviating the need to scrounge up a shawl pin to keep from freezing your canasta off while dashing out the door because you're late (ask me how I came up with that scenario).

There are more detailed pics on my flickr account, including some toplessheadless shots of me modeling it in relatively poor light in my living room.

In other news, I'm detox dieting. This is doing admirable things for my relationship with the scale at the gym, but less-than-admirable things for my mood. As such, my biggest cheat has been diet Coke and coffee - after four days the headache wasn't abating, and I'm a weenie. So, to help a sister out, if you see me put anything near my mouth that looks like it came out of a package, contains hydrogenated oil or high-fructose corn syrup, remind me that I might as well take a syringe full of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, and inject it directly into my caboose.

In other OTHER news, the spouse turns 40 on Sunday. Wish him a happy birthday if you see him, or facebook harass him if you don't. :)