Sneak Peek!

I've been pretty busy with design work lately and which means I've been neglecting my blog :o(  If it's any consolation, the blog has been on my mind lately...mostly how I need to do an update.  If this sounds vaguely familiar to you then you've probably talked to me in person about it or I've written it on here before.  Anyhow!  I've been charting my heart out lately.  Obsessively.  It's to the point where Mr. SpiderKate is starting to put his foot down to make me stop so that I go to bed and get some sleep.  It's just soo hard to stop when I'm really excited about this new lace shawl design!  I'd say at this point that I'm 80% finished with charting and just need to knit a swatch of two more charts and I'll have the design down.

In other news I've finished up the design for Vice Yarns Paradigm.  Even bigger news is that I finished writing the pattern yesterday and sent it off for editing!  Yay!  I feel soo good about having this pattern done. Seriously good.  A big thanks goes out to Mr. SpiderKate for taking time out on Sunday to help me with photographs so that I could get the pattern done.  He is seriously the best and most supportive force in my design work.  I think just being able to talk to him about the design process is really helpful because sometimes I just need to voice my concerns over a design and by doing so I figure out the answer.

Did I mention how happy I am with this design? Honestly, I love love love it.  Believe me when I say it was quite the journey to get to this point.  Let me clarify that.  I've always loved the design I had in mind for this yarn because the yarn is really what inspired me to use this particular edging pattern in a sideways knit shawlette.  The journey involved figuring out the best increase scheme for the shawlette.

The first time I start knitting the sample, I realized pretty quickly that my initial increase scheme wasn't going to work and I had to rip back to almost the beginning of the shawlette.  The second time I knit it, I went with a different increase scheme and about halfway through realized that it was going to use up too much yarn, but I forged ahead and kept knitting.  Yes, I knit the whole shawlette.  The good news on this one is that I didn't run out of yarn, but the bad news is that I was left with 1 gram of yarn.  

So guess what I did?  I ripped back.  But before I could rip back, I had to thread an afterthought lifeline.  I'm going to confess, this is the first time I've ever put in a lifeline after the fact, so I was little nervous that it wasn't going to work out.  It was a pretty easy lifeline to put in after the fact because there is a point in the knitting where the lace edging doesn't have any lace per se, but I still wasn't sure I'd gotten it right.  With my newly place lifeline, I starting the ripping process and low & behold the lifeline was in the right place!!!  I was beyond thrilled because it saved me 48 rows of knitting. Yay!  I must say that this yarn holds up BEAUTIFULLY to being ripped and reknit.  This pattern should be published sometime next week, so check back for a post with more details!