Addicted to Lace

June 14, 2009 at 4:22 pm | Posted in Knitting | Leave a comment

Now, that’s nothing new around here, isn’t it? 😉 After writing that glowing review for Victorian Lace Today a few weeks ago, of course I had to try my hand at one of the patterns. I’m going to make the Maltese Shawl, after finding the appropriate yarn, of course. Thanks to the perfect service from Jürgen Weidner, I soon was in the possession of this:

Three skeins of Malabrigo Baby Merino Lace in Bergamota. The first skein is already wound using my shiny new ballwinder, which I acquired at the same time. The yarn feels really yummy, and it’s a joy to knit up, as you can see here:

I made a provisional cast-on over a spare cable of my Addi Clicks, and acquired a 4.5 mm Addi lace needle after a few rows, since I want to make my life with this as easy as possible, or I’ll never finish. The pointier tips of the lace needles are just what I need here. I have the feeling the gold-coloured finish of the lace needles is a bit less slippery than the normal Addis, but this could well be my imagination.

The picture was made after 3 pattern repeats from 88 comprising the main panel of the shawl, so I’m into this for the long haul. You can also see some big bulky metal rings in the picture. Those are my sorry excuses for stitch markers currently, since my open plastic ones were driving me to distraction with catching the yarn in all the wrong places. I’d like to have some closed rings a bit smaller, but for the moment those will do.

So, don’t expect to get updates of this venture very often, this is definitely not TV knitting, being “real” knitted lace, meaning every row is a pattern row, no dreaming while purling back across the wrong side allowed. But I think the look of the finished lace will be so worth it.