A (Finally) Finished Product

Finished size is 74 X 47.
Knit Picks Shadow Golden Glow Tonal -- 91 grams used -- approximately 800 yards
US 5 Needle
US 9 Needle for cast off

Alexandra Gold -- Finishing Steps

I like to use a large mixing bowl to soak my finished knitted item. Somewhere, I read that you are supposed to soak your wool for at least thirty minutes in (not too) warm water so that the water saturates the wool. The reason is that the lanolin in the wool is a natural water repellent and it takes time for the water to work into the fibers.



I add just a little lavender scented body wash. Not because it needs it, but because I really like the smell of it on the dry wool. You should just push the wool under the water and not agitate it at all. Agitation and warm water is what makes yarn felt. Felted lace shawls are not really pretty

 I then put the next smaller bowl on top of the wool and fill it part way with water. This holds all of the yarn under water so that it soaks evenly.

 After 30 minutes, I took the smaller bowl off of the yarn. Look at all of that yellow dye that has come out of the wool into the water!

 Carefully rinse the wool in cool clear water until there is no more dye coming out. Again, be careful not to agitate it too much even in cool water. I pull the wool to the side of the bowl and let the water run into the bowl -- not over the yarn directly.

After pouring out all the water, I gently press down on the wool to squeeze out more water. DON'T EVER TWIST WET WOOL!!!! The wool fiber is weakest when wet and you might have a forever stretched out item.

 After gently squeezing out the wool in the bowl, I put it on a towel. Make sure if you use a dark towel that it is older and does not give off dye or lint onto your newly made item.

 Roll up the towel with the item in it.

Then roll the towel up the other way so that you have fashioned a "ball" of sorts.










Put some pressure on the towel ball so that most of the remaining water is squeezed into the towel. You want your item damp not sopping!


I blocked my Alexandra Shawl using my new blocking wires. It was easy to thread the wires into each scallop tip and along the top edge. It only took a few T pins to stretch it out.

The lace shawl took up nearly the entire double bed and could have been stretched larger if I had had a bigger bed! At 74 X 47 this project is huge!! But really beautiful. So happy with Dee O'keefe's Design.

Update on Alexandra Gold -- and a Humble Stitch

I have just started the 19th row of the 5th chart of Dee O'Keefe's Alexandra. Now that I have hit this mark, the  number of stitches in each row is well over 300 -- and growing with every row. Some of the rows seem to go much faster than others. I don't know if it is the specific pattern of stitches or my frame of mind that makes some rows so much more difficult than others. But the process is definitely educational as I have learned a lot about how to fix errors as many as eight rows below.

Now I know you must ask "Ledra, how do you get eight rows before discovering an error?"

"Well, I have to tell you that some errors are easier to find than others."

Specifically, errors which are not missing stitches, but misplaced stitches. Take the above picture. Until I mentioned error, did you see the one in this picture? It is there, I noticed it after I took this picture and I am not going down after it at this point. I will just consider it my "humble stitch" and move on.

What is a humble stitch, it is a stitch that keeps you humble. In quilting there is a myth that Amish women purposely made a mistake in one of the blocks of every quilt that they do because only God is perfect. I know quite well that I am far from perfect as I have never had to intentionally make a humble stitch or a humble block -- they are naturally in every knit piece and quilt that I make.

Happy knitting!

2 Corinthians 12:9

Progress for Alexandra Gold

I have made some progress since the last time I posted about my Alexandra Gold shawl. I am currently on the second repeat of Chart 3 -- row 7. I really like this pattern. Like Dee O'Keefe's Ashton, the Alexandra is really fun to do and much easier than Summer Nightsong or Fall Colored Ginkgo. I highly recommend this as a first lace shawl. That is not to say that I have not had to "tink" any rows. I have -- several. But it is more due to trying to knit the lace while too tired or too distracted.




The color on the above photo is washed out. The actual yarn is much richer in color, but I have the old style iPhone camera without the flash. The yarn that I am using, Knit Picks Shadow, is a nice yarn, but it has its problems. It tends to be really sticky. Even tinking only a couple of rows back, I found that the fibers had already started to bond to each other which makes me think that this might be a good yarn for felting, but not for a heavily used item that you don't want to felt. I have read a few on line reviews of this yarn by knitters who sat that this yarn pills, but I have not had the same experience. I did buy 1000 yards of the lavender tonal at the same time to do another shawl, so I will have plenty of work with it to be able to form a solid opinion myself!




Happy Knitting!!

Alexandra Gold

I have started another of Dee O'Keefe's beautiful patterns: The Alexandra. I am doing the full sized shawl version as opposed to the shawlette size that is also included with the pattern. I am using Knit Pick's Shadow tonal in Golden Glow. It is a lace weight yarn in a beautiful pale yellow with peachy tones. However, I seem to be having a dickens of a time getting started. I think that I have been very distracted and seem to start and stop and tink and reknit over and over again. Although I took this picture several days ago, I have not gotten much farther than this. 

I like the yarn. It is soft and the color is wonderfully rich. However, it is a little "sticky". When I have had to go back and tink something that I did the prior day, it seems to have already settled in and stuck together. I imagine that it would be a very easy yarn to felt.

I am doing some work on my other project Summer Nightsongs. Maybe that is part of my problem, I keep switching between the two projects and it is messing with my rhythm. For the last few months, I have been trying to stick to working on just one project at a time. Maybe that has made me a better knitter because I learn the pattern easier. Too late now!

Happy Knitting!!!

One Shawlette Done, Another on the Needles.

I finished my Fall Colored Ginkgo shawlette last Monday, but did not have time to block it until today. It is upstairs drying as I write this. I ran by Jo-Ann Fabrics this afternoon and picked up another 50 pins. I am glad I did, because pinning this one out took every pin in the house. I should have put more pins along the straight edge at the top of the shawlette, but I did what I could.

I should have called this the Tiger Eye Shawlette! I like the way the stripes look now that it is stretched out. For awhile I thought that the stripes were too pronounced and too dark, but now that you can see more light coming through, it is much nicer.

I bought yarn on Monday night to start the Alexandra Shawl and the Haruni. The Alexandra is Dee O'Keefe's latest design. It is beautiful -- very geometric. The Haruni is a shawl by Emily Ross. It has a lovely "star" at the center tip of the shawl. Both these shawls will be summer shawls -- light and airy. For both I selected Knit Pick's Shadow Tonal. For the Alexandra I picked Golden Glow and for the Haruni I picked Blue Violet. The golden is a very pale yellow and the blue violet is more lavender than violet.

Since I did not pay for express shipping, I knew that the yarn would not get here until the end of the week. This put me in a dilemma as I knew I wouldn't be able to not knit for four or 5 days. What would I do on my train rides? But if I started a new project, it would not be done before the yarn for the Haruni and the Alexandra arrived. This meant that I either I would have to wait to start the Alexandra or I would have two shawls going at one -- as if that has never happened before.

So, I decided that I would go ahead and start a new project anyway and I would have to have two projects going at once.  I started a small shawlette called Gail or Nightsongs by Jane Araujo. It is a really beautiful with leaves that look more like peacock feathers than leaves. The yarn I selected was some that I bought myself for a birthday present. I was saving it for a very special lace project. It is a lovely blue, green and rust Crazy Zauberball. This yarn is two ply with each ply a different variegated color. Yum. Rich colors with a great effect. The plies do split a bit, but as long as you are careful, it isn't too bad.

The Knit Pick's order arrived yesterday and I spent the whole evening hand winding one of the Golden Glow hanks into a center pull ball using my Nostepinne. This meant that I did not cast the Alexandra on until this morning. I have only gotten about the 1st 30 rows done, but I did want to get started as the designer is hosting a KAL (knit a long) on Knitting Paradise.

Well, I have better things to knit, er, do; so I will close this post.

Happy knitting!

Ashton Shawlette continues to grow

It has how grown big enough that I can't stretch it out too much or it will extend past my 47 inch circular. I have finished chart 3 and am about to start chart 4. That means there is only 19 more rows to go before I cast off! Yea!

I have been thinking about how I will block it. I really don't have the money to spend on blocking wires right now. I saw one of Dee O'Keefe's posts where she suggests using cotton yarn in place of a blocking wire for the top of the shawl only.  You would have to stretch it really tight and use pins to keep it in a straight line. Of course you would pin out each point on the two wings.

I am trying to pick which of the other yarns that I bought will be the next shawlette.

Happy Knitting!

Snowtop Mountain Shawl - The Ashton Shawlette

As a member of the message board, Knitting Paradise, I have been the recipient of a very wonderful gift from Dee O'Keefe, lace designer extraordinaire. She has been walking several of us through the process of learning how to knit lace with her Ashton Shawlette pattern. It is almost like being in a knitting class. I search the site for "Ashton" and I come up with several postings with other people's works in process, their questions on the pattern and Dee's tireless assistance and instructions.

Last week, I posted my experience of searching for just the right yarn. While I bought a handful of yarns that could work, my pick for the very first Ashton was the Kauni Effaktgarn wool from Denmark. The color is soothing and the picture does not do justice to the gradual change from dark to light. The colors seem to be all natural colored unbleached wool with the color change coming from slowly spinning in more and more light wool.

The yarn is not too soft, nor is it exceptionally clean as it still has occasional bits of hay and other fiber still stuck in the wool. It has a fuzzy aura to it and I think that it would felt very easily. The 2 ply yarn is not tightly twisted and does split occasionally, but not so much as to make it annoying to knit. I think that this yarn will block out nicely.

I am enjoying this project very much!

Happy Knitting!

Yarn People are Crazy!

Saturday, 7:00 AM, mid January, 14 degrees Fahrenheit  -- and I waited for an hour to get inside. It was the LYS's biggest sale of the year: The "If You Think I'm Counting All This, You Must Be Crazy" Sale was a chance to buy some great yarn at 40% off; but only if you were in line by 8:00 AM.

Unfortunately, I did not go with a plan; I didn't go with a list of what I wanted; I didn't have any patterns. The only thing I had in mind was 400 yards of fingering weight yarn for The Ashton Shawlette by Dee O'Keefe. My feet were burning from the cold when I finally got in the store. And I have to admit, my mind went numb and I didn't know where to start! So I calmed myself down by referring to the short list of yarns that were not included in the sale. I didn't want to waste time looking at yarn that was not on sale. 

Noro! I ran for the shelf that held the beautiful Kureyon Sock Yarn. I grabbed two different color ways: Aqua/Purple and Pinks/Purple. This is a 70% Wool 30% Nylon blend that could be perfect for the Ashton Shawlette! I wanted to make sure that I would have either color to choose from should this be the yarn. Although I have never knitted with this specific Noro yarn, I have knitted two pairs of socks with the worsted weight variety: my road trip socks and my forest footies.

Not completely satisfied with my first possibility, I headed to the back room where most of the sock yarn is stashed. A beautiful variegated yarn caught my eye. This hand-painted 100% Merino Wool from Koigu Wool Designs, KPPPM ranges from a pale apricot through shades of orange into a deep burgundy. Yum! I picked up three hanks totaling 450 yards. This would be a gorgeous Ashton Shawlette in beautiful fall colors.

No sooner had I picked up the Koigu, then I saw a beautiful Kauni lace weight yarn from Danmark. There were several delicious colors, but I liked the chocolate to off-white that will have a self striping effect to most knitted items.

Wow! I had so many wool choices at this point -- maybe I should look at something different. Louisa Harding Yarns; Mulberry in Midnight Blue. The 100% silk yarn is so silky and slippery that the yarn ball won't stay together, but the yarn has a wonderful shine to it. Could this be the yarn for the shawlette?

Back past the Noro shelves. What was that? Did I miss seeing that the first time? I was so busy looking at all of the sock weight and lace weight yarns, I missed the beautiful bulky Noro yarn Hitsuji. Now why, if I was looking for yarn for a lace shawl, would I want to look at a bulky yarn? But it looked so good, with the rust and green and goldenrod colors. Hmmmm. What to do? What to do?

So what did I bring home?

ALL OF IT! Happy Knitting!