Since I am still only spinning the lace yarn for the shawlette I’d like to design, I have been lying awake in the dark thinking of how to execute said design.  Some things have been hard to figure out just in my head and will need to be put on paper to see how the mechanics will actually work out.  Some things I think of then forget as I drift off to sleep, leaving me only to wake up in the morning knowing I had a solution and it’s gone.

One of the mathematical things I’ve been working on is the fact that the lace pattern I have chosen is an even stitch number stitch pattern.  Most shawls started at the top, as I want to start this one, tend to have an odd number of stitches in between the edge stitches and the center stitch.  Last night, I believe I worked out how to jigger it, now I just need to find out if it’ll look alright.

Meanwhile, the sock design I began working on in June is slowly making progress.  I finished the first sock only to discover that even though I had gotten gauge in my swatch, I lost a whole stitch per inch when knitting the sock.  Eight stitches per inch is quite a bit different that 9 stitches per inch, especially in stretchy 2×2 ribbing.  So, I’m working the second sock on needles that are half a millimeter smaller.  The unfortunate part is I really liked how the color of the yarn worked out in the larger gauge, and in the smaller gauge it’s spiraling.  The little bit of fancy stitch patterning it has is an 11 stitch repeat, so not much I can do there to play with fit.  Just have to live with the change in color patterning.