Raindrops on Roses Shawlette

I’m going to start with this: I love this shawl.  The pattern is beautiful.  The yarn is beautiful.  This pattern and this yarn were a perfect combination, and the results are spectacular.

Official Stats

• Date Started: June 3, 2015
• Date Finished: June 27, 2015
• Pattern: Raindrops on Roses Shawlette by Assorted Musings (Ravelry, blog)
• Yarn: 495 yards Nice & Knit Fingering in Peony
• Needles: U.S. 5 / 3.75 millimeters
• Finished Dimensions: For blocking, I pinned it out to 19.25” deep at the center and 47” wide at the widest point.  When I took the pins out after it dried, it shrank a little to about 17.5″ deep and 45″ wide.
• Made for: Test knit; I think I’m going to keep this one 🙂
• Ravelry Project Page

About This Project

In early May, I flew from Orlando to Hartford, Connecticut.  From there, I was driving to Vermont to attend my cousin’s college graduation.  This is the cousin for whom I wove the Dr. Who Scarf.  My father also flew into Hartford from Ohio.  His flight didn’t arrive until four hours after mine, so I googled yarn shops near the airport and found Creative Fibers (website, Ravelry).  This is a great yarn shop, located only 10 minutes from the Hartford airport.  If you ever find yourself needing to kill time waiting for a delayed flight, I highly recommend visiting this shop.  When I went into the shop, I asked if they had any local yarns.  The woman working that day directed me to this yarn from Nice & Knit.

Nice & Knit (website, Ravelry) is yarn hand-dyed by two sisters, not far from the Creative Fibers shop.  They have four yarn weights — fingering, sport, DK, and worsted — all in 100% superwash merino.  The yarn was a dream to knit.  It’s so soft and smooth, with no hint of splitting.  Their colors are amazing.  In addition to the skein of Peony that I used for this project, I bought a skein of fingering in Seagrass, a stunning bright yellow-green.  I haven’t knit anything with that skein yet, but after knitting up the Peony I’m dying to find the right pattern for the Seagrass.  The label says the skein is 490 yards / 100 grams.  My skein of Peony was a little overweight, at 103. 8 grams, and that turned out to be a good thing because I added 1.5 lace repeats to the border.   I used 100.3 grams (495 yards) of yarn.  If my skein had been right on the nose or a little under, I wouldn’t have had enough yarn to make the shawl larger!

The pattern was well-written and a fun knit.  I followed the charted directions, as I always do with lace, but I did read through the written instructions and found them easy to understand.  I think it would be a great first lace project.  If you look closely at the picture above, you may be able to see that a 2-stitch garter column separates each repeat of the lace pattern.  This feature is helpful in keeping track of the repeat, even if you aren’t using stitch markers.  There’s no lace work on the back, but it’s also not a straight purl across because you knit the stitches for the garter stitch columns.  I found myself automatically counting stitches between the garter stitches as I worked across the back, and this helped me as find any yarn overs I accidentally omitted in the preceding row.  The pattern calls for 3 repeats of the lace.  I wanted to use as much of my skein as I could, so I asked Assorted Musings if it was okay with her if I made the shawl bigger.  She said yes.  I was able to get 1.5 more repeats out of my skein.  It’s a fun pattern, and a relatively quick knit; I knit it in about 30 hours, including the extra lace repeats.  Assorted Musings plans to release the pattern on July 15.  You should get it and knit the shawl!