(By the way, they posted about this correction in the Ravelry group but did not send out an email for this error as they did for the previous error in the cast-on. So if you downloaded the first clue within about 14 hours of it being initially posted, you need to download it again to get the corrected pattern. The latest pattern as I write this says “updated 2:04pm 1/10/10 at the bottom of each page.)

Anyhow, I sat down to tink back and discovered my work was pretty much, well, un-tink-able. The combination of the somewhat “sticky” yarn — I was using the Luxe, which is a wool/silk blend — with the lace cast-on used in the pattern meant I had to suck it up and pull it off the needles to rip it out completely.

At that point I lost interest.

I was planning on doing this knit-along purely for entertainment, and I loathe ripping out, so I decided to set it aside until such point as the pattern is complete. Hopefully all errors will be caught by then.

(There was a question in the comments about the lack of beads on my cast-on — I was doing the unbeaded version as I’m not a big fan of beaded knitting.)

Anyhow, I conveniently had a draft pattern of one of my own designs waiting in the wings, so I dug out the yarn I’d bought for it and cast on something different.

The yarn is Madeline Tosh sock yarn in the “Baltic” colorway. I believe made a brief appearance on my blog after I purchased it a couple of weeks ago.

And the pattern is going to be for a shawlette. I seem to be on a shawlette kick lately, don’t I?

Speaking of shawlettes, my Aestlight accompanied me to work today. I wore it over my coat like a big scarf — this is one of my favorite uses for shawls. It was pretty darn cold today so I was happy to have it!

Lucy sez:

“Darn right it was pretty darn cold today! It’s a good thing you got me this sheepskin!

Here’s the view from this morning:

The sun was coming out. Yay!

Things are looking good down on the street. I went out and ran some errands. The streets were fine. The parking lots, not so much. Very icy.

I also finished this:

My Talisman Shawl. It sure doesn’t look like much in that photo, does it? The pre-blocked dimensions are 48″ by 24″.

Blocking achieved this miracle:

After blocking, it’s 64″ wide by 34″ down the center back. Knit from one skein of Wollmeise, with just 14 grams leftover.

Here’s a close-up of the lace pattern:

Here’s what I started today:

Care to hazard a guess as to what it is?

Miss Lucy slept through the blocking of the Talisman Shawl today. I’m sure she’s kicking herself that she missed out on helping me. But I turned the heat on this past weekend and she’s been happily sleeping through the most exciting events.

In the comments Brit observed:

It seems that progress on the True Love stole is going more slowly than on your last two shawls.  Is that because you aren’t finding as much time to knit?  Or is it because it is a difficult pattern?

I was wondering when someone would ask me why the heck it is taking me so long to knit this baby.

The reason is the former, not the latter. While this stole is heavily patterned, there really are no tricky bits to it. The lace stitches consist only of yarnovers, k2tog, and a sl1 k2tog psso double decrease. Every row is knit. There is patterning on every row, but that just makes it more entertaining to knit, as far as I’m concerned.

And each row can be completed pretty quickly. Because it is a stole, it is not extremely wide, so I can whack out a row in a few minutes.

Getting that few minutes is the problem. I have had a whole lot of impediments to knitting lately, so progress has been almost non-existent. Still, I got a nice chunk of knitting time in yesterday afternoon, so that was encouraging.

And my second sock is almost done. I will hopefully finish it tomorrow on the commute. As soon as it is done, the stole will accompany me as commuter knitting, so I can get a few more rows knit every day.

Stay tuned for further developments . . .

Lucy sez:

“Just finish my white blankie, willya?”