Typical me, I started something... And now I'm not too sure

I think all my blog post titles should be Morrissey lyrics from now on. Yesterday I finished my Annis shawl. It took me about a month to do it which is not bad considering I missed a few weekends of knitting. I blogged about starting it here when I thought it would go quickly enough. In this post the sad tale of the nupps emerged. I really struggled with them and so I left out the second row of nupps. I then avoided the project for a bit as I didn't want to do the next row of nupps. Luckily someone on Ravelry suggested this video which uses a crochet hook to do the nupp stitch all in one go. This eliminated the need to purl seven together and may have saved my sanity. Even though the nupps were easier the row still took ages.

I was very happy to reach the stocking stitch short row section. I'd been told the short rows really flew but I wasn't convinced as I was so slow knitting the lace section. I was proved wrong and knit the short row section really quickly. I think I got most of it done at the cookie exchange night last week. A cookie exchange night you say? A few of us knitters including R from she knit up that ball, Tea and Cakes and K from chocolate bunni crafts met up for some knitting and chat with a batch of cookies each. We then exchanged cookies so everyone went home with a selection of cookies. I've been munching tasty home baked cookies all week. It was such a fun night and coming home with yummy cookies and some new stash (thanks R!) was a bonus.

Back to Annis, here it is all finished and blocked. The malabrigo laceweight was really lovely to knit with and I love the colourway, which is olive if anyone is interested. The pattern suggested 5mm needles and I used them after my first cast on and the fabric seemed very loose and floppy so I went down to 4mm when I cast on again. I usually need to go down a needle size for most patterns anyway.





I'm not entirely sure why I didn't really enjoy knitting this but for some reason it was more an exercise in perseverance than enjoyment. Hence the title of the blog post. I loved knitting my Ishbel shawl and the Storm Cloud Shawlette but for some reason this didn't float my boat. I think it might be because it is done from the outside in rather than inside out like most shawls. It starts with so many stitches that by the the time I got to the shorter rows I was already a little sick of it. The lace part isn't difficult and there are only eighteen lace rows but it is very time consuming because of the nupps. Maybe I thought that after spending so much time on the lace I'd have more to show for it at the end. I'm not very keen on the look of the nupps in the end either. They're just bobbles with a fancy name and they're not that special looking for all the work that went into them. I think I would probably use beads instead of nupps if a pattern requires them in future. It also turned out smaller than I thought it would be, maybe I should have used sock yarn or used the needle size recommended in the pattern. The picture of the shawl in Knitty looks a good bit larger than mine. It's really more a scarflette than a shawl.

Saying all that though I don't dislike the end product, it is what it is and given some time I'll love it despite my slight disappointment about how it turned out. It's pretty and delicate and will be lovely draped around the shoulders. I probably won't wear it much as a shawl but more as a sort of short scarf/cowl type thing.  Here's some more pictures of the finished Annis.

As always all my craft projects are collected in this picasa album.