Lacing along

I've finally made enough progress on mum's shawl (Alpine Lace, from Victorian Lace Today) to post a picture or two. I'm really pleased with how this is going so far, although I feel slightly crazy for choosing an all lace pattern for my first real lace, along with a mohair blend yarn. Fortunately, the fuzziness of the mohair blend yarn tends to hide the small mistakes I've made so far...cos I'm not ripping this sucker back for nothing! Thank goodness for stitch markers (and makers of said markers, Donni and Nora!)

Bells and I were talking (well, emailing) lace yesterday and in particular the Kiri shawl which the designer, Polly, suggests can be done in 24 hours. If you are lace knitting freak perhaps!!! I did 4 rows of the shawl last night and it took me about 50 minutes, with no tv or other distractions, for fear I'll stuff up big time on the pattern. There's 121 stitches per row, so that's 484 stitches in 50 minutes, so that's about 9-1/2 stitches per minute. Now, there's 424 rows in this pattern (well, clearly based on my calculating ability, there could be more, or less, but anyway), so 424 x 121 = 51,304 stitches. Oh, and you have to increase on the middle pattern so that's another, say 296 x 4 = 1,184 stitches, so all up, let's say 52,500 stitches. At 9-1/2 stitches per minute, that's 5,525 minutes, or 92 hours. (Oof, my brain hurts...) So, at the rate of about 2 hours per week (cos, you know, I can't go without telly for too long!!) I'll get this finished, hmmm, sometime NEVER perhaps!!

Perhaps it's a good idea not to worry too much about this kind of maths!!! I am loving knitting this though - I do a little mental happy dance when I reach each marker with the right number of stitches and the pattern correct!! And then on every 8th row, I do a huge mental happy dance because it's a purl row. A plain old purl row. Who would have thunk that I'd actually enjoy doing a purl row!