Lovely

When Webs had its April sale (the same sale at which I bought the pillow yarn), I bought a cone of laceweight yarn in a slate blue color. When I was searching for patterns for it, I found one with a lot of movement. The gentle waves and lace that looked a bit like air bubbles reminded me of water, and it worked well with the blueish color. 

As always, the lace looked like a wad of crap (scroll down in this post to see for yourself) until I blocked it.

But once I did...

Utsukushii (mine ravelled here),

knit in Valley Yarns 2/10 Merino Tencel (Colrain lace) in Grey Blue

The pattern says that its name, Utsukushii, means "lovely" or "beautiful" in Japanese. I agree. It is lovely.

It's a 28 row repeat. Each of the narrow ends are supposed to have one repeat of the chart. I did two repeats after seeing a project on Ravelry that had done the same thing. The long edges maintain that pattern from the ends, but the center is done in a stockinette section with a couple purls thrown in to break it up. I love the way the pattern causes the edges to gently undulate.

I used my lace blocking wires on this, catching each wave in a couple of places and gently stretching and pinning it. Blocking isn't fast, but it certainly is worth it.

The finished project blocked to 23" x 64" or so. I'm hoping that's a good size to throw over a dress when I'm pretending to be an adult.

I heartily recommend this pattern. There is a purl stitch between each pattern repeat on each row, and the repeat itself is only ten stitches long. That meant that I quickly identified any mistakes. It was so much nicer to pick back in groups of ten rather than ripping back entire lace rows as I've done with other patterns. It did take a bit to get used to the chart, which looked different than I expected--Japanese style difference, maybe?--but the rows were also written out so I could check to see if the way I was interpreting the chart was correct. I think the finished result is pretty without being too prissy, and it has great movement. Lovely!