I hate it when I stumble over the names of knitting patterns. Especially ones I’m working on in public.
“What pattern is that?”
“Uh… Schief… Scheif… mumble mumble… Shawl”
“What?”
“I can spell it for you…”
Obviously I’d never make a good podcaster.
At any rate, I’m working on the Schieffelin Point Shawl*, a lovely new pattern. I saw the one that Susan did, and fell in love with it. Hers was made with the recommended yarn, which was really nice. But as this is the year of the stash, I was determined to find something I already own that would work.
I decided to use some Manos Silk Wool in ‘Hibiscus’, a lovely red with touches of pink and orange. Boy, do I love this color! The yarn is a little heavier than the called-for-Savannah yarn, so I probably should have used a larger needle for more drape, but I wanted it to be the same size as Susan’s–so I stuck with the same needle size. It will be denser and warmer, but I think it will be fine after blocking.
This shawl, like a couple of others I’ve done, starts with a garter-stitch tab. You provisionally cast on a few stitches, knit a few rows, then turn the work to pick up stitches along the garter ridges, and finally work the stitches from the provisional cast-on.
But one thing has mystified me about this process. When you do a provisional cast-on of “X” number of stitches, and later work those stitches downward, you lose one stitch. When you remove the waste yarn, you’ll have “X-1″ stitches, with a half-stitch on each end. Therefore, if you provisionally cast on 3 stitches, there will only be 2 stitches to pick up. I’ve always just sort of faked the extra stitch somewhere if I needed to have a specific number of stitches, but I find it interesting that none of the patterns have addressed that problem – they just tell you to return the “X” number of stitches from the provisional cast-on to the needle and knit them.
How do you deal with the discrepancy? I suppose you could cast on one extra stitch and then decrease one stitch in the next row when working upwards, and then you’d have the correct number of cast-on loops to pick up. Once I took the tail end of the yarn and wove it back into the edge of the knitting to form a full loop, and then picked it up. But usually I just pick up an extra stitch somewhere at the edge.
* I’m guessing that this should be pronounced “SHEE-fuh-lin”. Evidently Schieffelin Point is a place in Maine – anyone know the correct pronunciation?
Cabled Sheep lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she enjoys knitting, cooking, and munching veggies out of the garden. She never tires of Utah's glorious landscape.
