Monday, May 25, 2020

Uncia Shawl

You guys!  I finished my Uncia Shawl!  I am so so happy, it was by far the hardest most complicated thing I have ever knit.  It was the first time I'd ever done cables and it turns out the whole thing is made of different cables.  I love the pattern, I think it's gorgeous and I love how the shawl came out.




The pattern comes from The Book of Haps, by Kate Davies Designs, but the Uncia Shawl pattern is by Lucy Hague.  It's a fantastic book, with lots of history about haps and north sea knitting as well as traditional hap patterns and a variety of contemporary hap-inspired patterns.  I bought the book when I was in Scotland last year, but you can also get it on Ravelry.  I have the hard copy and PDF;  it was great to have the PDF while I knit (that's how I keep track using a PDF editor on my ipad).  The pattern and charts are very well written, but it was definitely very complicated.  The pattern was introducing not-yet-used stitches right up until the last ten rows (!!)   It had a total of 39 different stitches (only about 8 of which I knew before starting) including 22 different cable stitches.  Whew.



I ran out of yarn about 80% of the way through.  I was so aggravated, especially because I'd bought this yarn years ago for some other project I decided not to do and didn't have a ready source for more, not to mention it was mid-quarantine.  And of course I couldn't even find the label anywhere and the prettiest part of the pattern is the end (it knit from the skinny end to the fat end).  I finally found the label though and was able to pick up a ball from someone on Etsy.  (HOORAY!)


This was such a complicated knit that I really had a hard time working on it if there were any other people around. Since my usual dedicated knitting time is at our church knit night, I had been making only very slow progress.  But all the evenings at home during the shut-down provided a nice opportunity to work on it!










You can see the size a bit better here.  I always feel like a dork posing with the self-timer.



Here are a couple of pictures I took while working on it.



Right there are some of my very first cables :)

No comments:

Post a Comment