Bubble Dash Shawl

4/7 – I’ve been moving along well on this project. I’ve changed up color placement a bit from what is in the pattern, but I feel like this pattern rather invites that.

I did end up doing three bubble segments in the third bubble section, thinking that’s what I’d seen in the pattern (which I’m referring to only occasionally to check stitch counts and see what I should be doing). I’m not ripping it out as I can accommodate the stitch count difference in the striped bit to come.

However. :/ In the main color garter section after that, I somehow got WAY off on where I thought my center spine stitch was. I transferred it over to the second half of the shawl somehow and didn’t realize it until I was nearly done with that part. Rather than rip it out and reknit (which, in hindsight, is what I should have done), I dropped the stitches back and “fixed” them both there and where the spine should have been.

I continued from that point knitting as per the pattern (mostly), and went into the next CC stripes only to realize I was grossly off in stitch count between the two sides. I’d originally thought I was off with more on the right side than the left, but then when I checked later, it was the other way around. I believe I had counted prior to realizing my mistake with the spine stitch and then didn’t take that into account after “fixing” it. I was trying to remediate the stitch count issue by only doing YOs on the short side, but then I ended up with a center spine that looked like it had a good case of scoliosis happening. Sigh. I also then realized that the place where I dropped stitches down and “fixed” them still looked mega wonky because they’d also had YOs on either side of them, which I hadn’t though about until much later.

Upon putting the whole thing on a longer needle and was able to stretch it out better, I realized I was not going to be happy with it unless I ripped back and reknit the goofed up section. So I ripped and will begin reknitting now. I have also marked my center stitch with a removable marker (which the pattern does recommend doing if you’re having problems keeping it straight…which I hadn’t been for the longest time…somehow I think watching Oppenheimer while knitting might have had something to do with my error. :confused: )

It’s all good. I have lots of car knitting time happening tomorrow while we drive about 3 hours to and from where we’ll be watching the eclipse.

4/11 – As it turned out, I had to rip out part of my eclipse car progress from the return trip. Seems trying to follow directions after being out in the cold in a canoe all day isn’t wise. 😉 But I still made progress, and in the couple of days since, I have managed to finish the first wing (not without a bit of ripping here and there though. This is not a hard pattern, but it’s easy to get confused, at least it seems to be for me. That and I’ll say that there are things in the pattern that have errors, not horrible errors, but directions that don’t make sense given what you’re doing. It’s easy enough to tell what you’re supposed to do from what you’ve already done, but I kind of expect better from a big name designer, or her tech editor? I dunno. Whatever. I’m getting it done.

(Added: I went through the projects from this pattern, and it looks like the majority of them were done when this was released as an MKAL several years back. There are a few others since then. But none of them mention errors in the pattern, which is odd to me. Maybe they were discussed in an MKAL thread, if there was one? But then they weren’t fixed, which would be strange. It is fairly intuitive, so maybe no one thought it was noteworthy since it was easy to know what to do…the errors didn’t affect how you worked things, they just didn’t make sense for what they were saying. For instance, the garter ridges at the start of the second wing, it says “X stitches decreased” but the numbers are actually the number of stitches that are remaining, not decreased. Clearly, you aren’t decreasing 70 stitches in a single row. It’s things like that that are not “important” to making the pattern but make my editor brain twitch.)

I am now on the left wing, which I basically started by just mirroring what I did on the right as I did change up some colors and number of rows at the beginning due to my first section ending differently than written (which was my doing, not the pattern). I’m about ready to start the first “dash” section on this wing, which I enjoyed more than the bubble sections personally, though they were fun too. I don’t think this should take me much longer to finish, provided I have time to work on it.

The only big difference on this second wing is that since you’re working from the inside edge of the V instead of the outside as you were on the first wing, all of your yarn ends will end up on the wrong edge for fringe. While I was happy to cut and leave fringe ends for every yarn change on the first wing, I’m carrying yarn up the inside V edge instead on the second to avoid having a bazillion ends to weave in at the end. And I’ll also have to mimic the fringe color combos on the outer V edge based on what they are on the first wing. Not a biggie, though I’m suspecting I’ll run out of my C2 (red), so I just pulled the last skein of that from my stock to have just in case! I think I’m good with all of the other colors.

4/15 – I finished knitting this the other night. While watching something with Bill, I managed to confuse which colors I was supposed to use (3 and 4 got confused), but honestly, I rather like it being different than the first wing.

I did have enough of the red to finish, though I’m not sure if it’ll be enough for the fringe, so I’m still hanging onto the extra skein (though I’m really hoping I don’t have to break into it just for fringe!)

I need to block it, which I hope to do tomorrow, and then I can work on the fringe.

4/19 – Still needs to be blocked, but I added a couple of pre-blocked photos for reference.

5/6 – Blocked and fringed pictures are up!