“as an ook cometh of a litel spyr”

Did I ever tell you I used to be able to read (and to a certain extent speak) Middle English? And no, it wasn’t during the Middle Ages, it was during graduate school. Which was almost as far back as the Middle Ages.

But I digress.

Behold the little edging:

This is the beginning of a shetland-style rectangular shawl. I am knitting it from Jojoland 2-ply cashmere, which is a laceweight with 400 yards per 50-gram skein.

I love rectangular shawls, but I hate knitting on the edging afterward. Miles and miles of mind-numbing edging — arrrgh!

So I’m employing a mitered-corner technique here.

You start by knitting the bottom left corner — do a provisional cast on and knit the corner using short rows. Then you knit across the bottom border in as many repeats as you need, and do another short row corner for the bottom right. Turn your work, work across those live stitches, pick up stitches along the straight edge of the border repeats you worked, then undo your provisional cast-on and work across those stitches, and Bob’s your uncle!

Here is the etymology of “Bob’s your uncle.”)

Now you are ready to work back and forth across the shawl, working the border along with the body of your shawl. When you get to the top, you do a similar maneuver — work a short row corner, work a border across the top of the body stitches, attaching the border as you work, then work the last corner.

Easy as pie!

Well, not easy as pie to figure out. At least not for me. It took me a bit of winkling to get the corners to work properly.

The shawl is worked in garter stitch and has lace patterning on both right and wrong sides, so that it is continually entertaining to knit. I’m using a US size 3 (3.25mm) needle, so it is a bit slow going. The unblocked gauge is 6 stitches and 8 rows to the inch.

How long will I make it? I have a total of 1600 yards of the yarn, so I’ll either knit until it looks long enough, or til I run out of yarn.

Lucy is no doubt lost in thought — the coming delights of a cashmere kitty blanket!

I love the sky when it has a pinkish hue!

Speaking of a pinkish hue, I am knitting along on Sandvik. I actually got a fair bit done last night, for which I congratulated myself a little more than was really necessary.

It’s a relatively easy pattern — you have a lot of the same stuff over and over so at this point a glance at the chart now and then does it for me.

It’s the purling back rows that slow me down because I get so bored.

I’m working on a design for a rectangular shawl that has lace patterning on every row — that’ll keep me awake while I knit!

Please to Note

If you want to be entered in the pattern drawing, you need to leave a comment on Sunday’s blog post with a movie title with a state name in it. I mention this because there are a lot of comments on yesterday’s post with state names.

To draw the winner, I go into WordPress and look at the comments for Sunday’s entry only, see how many total comments there were and generate the random numbers within that range of numbers. Then I can easily find the winning numbers from within that group of comments. The comments from other entries aren’t among this group. This is the least labor-intensive way for me to do it. I need to be spending time knitting on my pink blob, not entering comments in a spreadsheet.

Happy Anniversary, Loopy!

If you read Sheri’s blog (and if you don’t, why the heck not?) you will see that she’s got another anniversary contest going on — to enter, all you have to do to enter is leave a comments saying where you first heard about The Loopy Ewe on this blog post. Reading through the comments, it makes me very happy to see how many people I’ve enabled into shopping at The Loopy Ewe.

Loopy rules!

Lucy grudgingly agreed when I told her that she rules more.