Yes, I Actually $W@TC#ED!
Mystery Stole 3 started last Friday. I was debating between using KnitPicks Alpaca Cloud in Midnight, or Misti Alpaca Lace in Denim. The only lace I’ve knitted has been scarves, and as long as they were “wide enough” and “long enough” the actual dimensions didn’t really matter. Enter MS3, where we are creating a stole. By definition, it is a rectangle, but width and length can vary, especially depending on the gauge you get. Melanie, the designer, has said her stole is 20″ wide, and there will be a spot where it can be lengthened or shortened to suit your taste (in 11″ increments), so it seems to me the big thing is width. If it is much less that 18″ wide, I can’t see that it would be wearable as a stole for me. So - yes, I swatched.
I hate swatching. It seems so wasteful of time (yes, I know - take time to save time and all that….) and materials. When given a yardage requirement, I never know if that includes enough to swatch or not. I don’t want to buy another ball of yarn just for swatching purposes….
Here I was supposed to get a “fabric” I liked, which allowed you to see the lace without being so lacy you couldn’t see the solid stuff. In addition, we have the option of adding beads to our stole, so I could also test out beads on the swatch to see how well they blended/enhanced the design. Well, you can hardly see them! Admittedly, it’s the lace that’s the star, but if you’re going to putz with the beads, shouldn’t they at least be visible?
I had the loveliest beads for the Misti Alpaca, but when I swatched they were invisible. The stole theme (to be revealed somewhere around the middle of the KAL) suggests the best colors are white or black. So after swatching a size 2 (lost it tonight, sorry - no photo) I decided it was too small. Size 4 looked good, but didn’t quite make a 6″ wide swatch and that was generally the accepted size to be “on gauge” so I also swatched a 5. I thought that looked a little large. So I swatched the black. Definitely more striking. The beads also showed up better, so I decided on the Alpaca Cloud. Yay. But this was just the start of the adventure….
So, I knit a portion of the first clue on my size 4’s. (The quick photo setup to allow blogging tonight doesn’t give me enough hands to stretch this out for you….hope to have a better photo later.) I decided that once it was blocked, this didn’t allow the solid portions to look very solid, and it became so lacy you couldn’t see the design well. So, as the Harlot and others say….. swatches LIE.
Rather than rip it all out, knit it again in a smaller size, only to decide that I really liked the bigger one better (or that was the only way to get it wide enough for my liking), I left it OTN and started another Clue 1 with size 3 Addi Lace Turbos:
OK. So you can’t see much difference. I’ll pin them out and show you again - perhaps with a ruler so you can see the size difference as well as the fabric difference.
The clue is 100 rows long, and I’m at 58 on the 4’s and 69* on the 3’s. Tomorrow is clue 2 - I hope to finish up and manage clue 2 in the next week so I’ll be up to speed.
Big news also in the MS3 crowd - Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the Yarn Harlot has joined the ranks of the MS3ers. She also posted about it on her blog today, and we’ve seen the participant numbers jump by 1,000 or so just today. Sign ups close tomorrow at midnight, so if you want to play you should join up now!*I met some other Minnesota MS3ers tonight and managed to knit 4 rows, make 3 mistakes, drop a stitch which had some origin or connection a few rows down that has been lost, so now I must tink back a few rows (I hope not down to my lifeline at row 50) until I can get all the proper stitches back on the needles. I’m guessing I’ll be back to row 62 or 64.