Amazing what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it. Or when you tell yourself that a two-row lace repeated ad nauseam is meditative, not boring. Or when you acknowledge that having such a simple knit languishing in your work basket for upwards of two years is a bit shameful. Either finish it or frog it, self! Didn’t want to frog it because I couldn’t think of another use for the yarn. It’s Lang Yarns Super Soxx Solid which I had previously used in a pair of colorwork socks that developed holes alarmingly quickly, and overwhelmingly in the sections where I used that yarn. It may have just been a bad skein, but I wasn’t willing to take chances with another pair.
The pattern is from Victorian Lace Today, and has a particularly utilitarian title, but it does describe it well. Jane Sowerby pulled the edging from Weldon’s Practical Needlework, mostly from the fifth volume in 1890, which according to her book has a wide variety of patterns for knitted lace edgings, which were mostly too wide to be scarves themselves, but worked well as borders. The naming conventions that Jane Sowerby uses in her book are all very ‘does what it says on the tin’, such as Dolphin Lace from Weldon’s 1887, with an insertion of Miss. Lambert’s center pattern for a Shetland scarf, 1845 which is both the actual name of the pattern and a gorgeous piece of lace with a double border (and I might consider casting on next) and also will help boost the word-count in a fiber blog, if I was concerned about something like that.
Got to break out my blocking wires for this one, which took some doing as they had slid behind a heavy piece of furniture (goes to show how often I do a proper job of blocking). I should have taken a photo of the set-up I had to use to get the job done. One end of the scarf was sitting on blocking mats set on top of my dog’s kennel, and I had threaded the wires down the sides of the scarf which were suspended in mid-air, and the other end of the scarf was resting on top of the space heater. The heater casing itself is wood, and doesn’t get very hot, which is the only reason I used it. My blocking efforts generally consist of giving my finished project a wash, wringing out most of the water in a towel, then leaving the knitwear to dry on whatever flat surface is available, but a proper blocking with pins and wires makes a world of difference in knitted lace. It opens up the pattern and really shows off the effort. I don’t generally have the patience for it, but considering how long my poor scarf was languishing in my work basket, I figured I’d do a proper job.