Tropical Orchid Thief Scarf

 Time to show off another finished object.  This is my interpretation of Ysolda's Orchid Thief Shawlette pattern from Brave New Knits.  It's the first pattern of Ysolda's I've knitted, my first time working totally from a chart and it's definitely the most challenging lace pattern I've done so far.

This was such a learning experience.  I can't tell you how much I learned about knitting!  Firstly, life lines life lines life lines.  These, for the uninitiated, are when you weave a bit of plain cotton thread through your knitting at a point you're happy with.  The extra loops from yarn overs, knit 3 stitches together, slipped stitches etc make it difficult to unpick lace if you've gone wrong as I found to my cost.  Taking the time to place the life lines every 10 rows or so, or at the end of every chart repeat means that if you go wrong you can just rip back to that point and it will be easy to pick up every stitch because there'll be a little bit of cotton threaded through it.

The second thing I realised is that chart knitting is nowhere near as scary or confusing as I thought it was.  Once you've learned what all the symbols mean and got to grips with what's repeated when it's actually not as traumatising as I had got the impression it would be.  I had charts 3 and 4 as electronic copies from the errata to the pattern and it was easy to align the line I was working on with the bottom of window on the computer.  This made is very easy to follow and not get lost.  As you progress, you just scroll up the screen one line at a time.

Another thing I realised is how important it is to read the pattern and understand how the row before links to the row you're knitting.  It's very easy to go wrong by forgetting a simple yarn over or not passing a slipped stitch over another.  If you're aware that when you reach a certain point you should be seeing the effect of that on the row below it's so much quicker to fix than unpicking hundreds of stitches.

Finally, at least for now, I learned how important blocking is.  Normally I'm quite lazy about this sort of thing and I'll just run things over with a steam iron to open everything up, but this scarf really needed a proper soak and then pinning out.  I was so pleased with the effect it might even induce me to do it more often!

But enough of the waffling... Here's the finished object.  It's knitted with the Kismet yarn from  Flamboyance Yarns.  This is a 4ply 100% blue-faced Leicester wool and the colourway is called Fourth Dimension.  I absolutely fell in love with the colours when I first saw this yarn and I wanted to use it for something special, rather than just another pair of socks that no one will see.  I toyed with the idea of making a hat for a while, but that would have left a lot of yarn still to use, so I was pleased when I found the Orchid Thief Shawlette which uses almost the whole thing.  Actually there was a point with about 7 rows to go when I was worried I wasn't going to have enough, but it worked our perfectly.

I love it.  I hope you do too!