Sidere

In preparation for vacation, I decided to buy myself a pattern that had been on my wishlist for a long time: Hilary Smith Callis' Sidere. I felt justified since a laceweight project takes a long time to knit, and the yarn takes up very little luggage space... and I really wanted it. 

We drove to New Orleans, which is about 12 hours. On the way home, I decided to start the Sidere shawl. A lot of knitting can be done on a long car ride.

Mississippi

Arkansas

Missouri

Illinois

The yarn is two hanks of bamboo that I bought at a craft fair. It was an impulse buy, so I was thrilled to find a good use for it.

I had 600 yards of yarn, which I knew meant I might not be able to do as many repeats on the bottom border as the pattern called for. Devastatingly, I ran out of yarn before finishing the picot bind off.* That was late on Saturday night, so, in a startling lucid moment, I put it aside.

Sunday morning I carefully ripped out the intricate bind off  and two rows of around 400 stitches each. Then I started the long slog of the bind off again. When I finally finished, I weighed my remaining yarn.

Don't blink.

I gave it a bath and then started running blocking wires through the picot edge, but there wasn't a great spot to do so. Instead, I ran the wires through the top edge and then pinned every single picot. After as many hours as I'd spent on this shawl, I was in it to win it.

The pattern has lots of short rows, so it's asymmetrical. It makes it more interesting to knit, and the eyelet rows move in unexpected ways to add visual interest, too.

I love to see shawls unfurled in all their glory,

but I typically wear them wrapped around my neck like this:

Despite my problem of running out of yarn, I really am thrilled with the way this turned out.

Sidere (mine ravelled here),

knit in two skeins of Robin J. Edmundson's Fine Bamboo

*The picot bindoff is a meditative exercise. Cast on two. Breathe. Bind off four. Breathe. Think not of the end. The end will never come. The destination is the journey.