My Last Duchess*
July 03, 2019
I started a knitalong today, not Marie Greene's 4 Day Knitalong which I have decided to eschew this year for various reasons, but an Estonian lace shawl knitalong by Mari-Liis Hirv who is Estonian. I love the internet! Mari-Liis is known as the Pattern Duchess, and her designs are beautiful. The lace shawl we will be working on this year is the Birthday Lace Shawl (pictures are on her web site), and it will take a while. Mari-Liis is giving us two rows per day of the pattern, Monday through Friday ... which I can do! Two rows! I can do it! That is my kind of knitalong.
We started on June 24th, but I didn't get my yarn until day before yesterday. You can start now, if you would like to join me at swearing at the nupps; it's a free pattern, found on Facebook or on her website. We are on Day 8 which is only 16 rows, easy to catch up on.
You can do the shawl using a bead or a purl stitch or a plain knit stitch if you want, but I wanted to make myself use nupps if I could. This pattern has a lot of nupps. Before my stroke, I learned how to knit nupps, but I found them annoyingly hard to make and wrote them off, much the same as I had written off intarsia and brioche. Now that I had my stroke and have loads of time on my hands, I'll try to perfect them if I can. .
What are nupps, you ask? They are truly horrible instruments of torture in my opinion, but they look so pretty when they are done well! They look like little puffs of softness, like little clouds. IF you can do them right. My nupps so far look like little squished up balls of mud, but some -- well, one -- of them came out pretty good.
Pitiful.
Slightly less pitiful.
Nupps are fairly easy to make: just knit and do a yarn over in the same stitch until you have 7 stitches, and on the next row (which is purled) you just purl all 7 of the stitches together. It sounds so simple. BUT. There is no way in hell to get the needle into the front of those 7 #@&$%*&#@ stitches so that you can frigging purl them!
Mari-Liis has a video of how to do the nupps, and it is very good. You should be able to do nupps easily.
The problem is, I had a stroke. My right hand fingers don't work well yet, and I am doing as much as I can to make them work. They will work eventually, probably just before my death due to the nupps. Anyway. I'll get my thumb to do the nupps, and maybe get my finger working at the same time too some day, and the nupps will be defeated!
I'm using KnitPicks Shadow Lace Weight yarn, which is 100% merino, 2 ply, in the color Blossom Heather. It is a bit darker than I wanted, but it's ok. It also is a bit hairy, but that might be fine too, since hairy yarn stays put if the needle becomes pulled out of the stitches, which may have already happened once or twice.
Knit happy! Happy Fourth of July!
*My Last Duchess is a little bit creepy poem by Robert Browning, but I love it. This may be my last Duchess shawl if the nupps kill me!