My local weavers guild has started a member challenge called UnFinished Objects Finally Finished. (UFOFF). Last week I dug a shawl in its bag out of a box on my yarn storage shelves. No pattern or notes were with it. Today I located the book and made a copy of the chart and translation page for the instructions. A few years back I was in a lace shawl knitting phase. I had finished a lovely shawl from a book called Þríhyrnur og langsjöl / or Three-cornered and long shawls by Sigridur Halldorsdottir. The book was in written in Icelandic but came with a translation of some of the text in the book. The patterns are all charted.
The first shawl I knit from the book was called Hyrna Herbogar and it was fun, but tricky.
For my second one, I chose a simpler pattern based on Old Shale lace called Hyrna Með Krónuprjóni (or HMK as it will be referred to from now on). Here is the photo from the book. Mine will look different since I chose a striping sock yarn called Noro Kuryeon in natural colors.
Based on my project notes in Ravelry, I began working on HMK March 16, 2009 and sometime in May, 2009, put it down. From the posts in the Three Cornered Knitters group on Ravelry it appears that I had figured out I was going to run out of yarn for the second time. The post says I had 34% remaining to knit and only 32% of my total yarn remaining (checked by weighing it in grams on a digital scale before and during the knitting). Then there was also a post that said I traded some handmade soap for the some Kuryeon Sock color 149 that another Ravelry member had leftover when she finished her socks. The yarn came pretty quickly after the trade was negotiated, but I never picked HMK back up to start knitting again.
How did I know how far I was you ask? I am a geeky knitter and I like to make spreadsheets for shawl patterns to keep track of my yarn usage and percentage completed.
So to document how far the shawl was when I picked it back up to finish, here she is two weeks shy of 7 years after beginning.
Fortunately all my stitch markers were still in place. Based on the number of stitches in the first section of the chart, I figured out I was on row 13 of the 32 row repeat. Then I remembered the spread sheet and counted the total number of stitches on the needle to figure out the actual row I was on and it matched with that row of the repeat. It was a simple knit 3, purl to the last 3 stitches, knit 3. Then I went on to row 14 on the chart and was a stitch off when I got to the center. (The chart is only half the shawl, then you mirror it for the other half as you knit.) Fortunately the stitch markers helped me narrow down that the mistake was in the section closest to the center. I read my knitting, compared it to the chart, and figured out that about 6 stitches away from the center and 3 rows below, my needle had caught a strand and I had knit it as if it were a stitch, increasing by one stitch in that section. It was an easy fix, I just dropped the unneeded stitch down the 3 rows to where I had caught it and can now knit on! I have 168 stitches on the needle (started with 384) and I am on row 76 of 130 and 21,512 stitches out of 26,128 total to be knit therefore it is 82% complete. Each row decreases as I knit, so it should go pretty quickly. I will update my progress on Instagram if you’d like to follow. #UFOFF
