Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

In the interest of pulling things off the UFO pile, I have been working on this shawl for Hannah. I’m making it with a 2.5 mm hook and Malabrigo silkpaca lace weight yarn. My goal was to create a thin shawl with intricate little stitches and liquid level drape. It’s going well but slowly.

It normally takes me about a month to complete a shawl with three hanks of fingering weight yarn. Three hanks makes it big enough but not overwhelming for Hannah who is only 4’ 11”. However, after watching many period dramas and romances, she has started to wear her shawls larger for greater presence and dramatic effect. Reasonable, given the times. If one must live in interesting times, at the very least the fashion can be escapist.

I do not think I had fully considered what it means to make a large shawl with lace weight yarn and a small hook. I’m on my fourth hank, which means, at my rate of crochet, I have spent about 80 hours on it so far. I have to finish another hank of perfect periwinkle and then start the border in two hanks of Paris Night. That’s a total of seven hanks of yarn at 20 hours a hank, so 140 hours of crochet work for this shawl. So look at that! I’m over half way done.

Because of how my weird little brain works, I’ve been thinking a lot about the border. Not that you can see it in the pictures, but this will block out into a nice, openish lace pattern. I think the border needs to be more solid but it also needs to be amazing both to finish off the shawl in a way that looks great and is worthy of 140 hours of my time but also to really draw the eye over the whole wrap.

I looked through some of my books of border stitches but they just aren’t making me happy. I feel like I need to create my own border by joining some of my favorite solid stitch patterns together to make a border that compliments the stitch pattern of the shawl and makes me happy to pet as I work. I’m thinking about something with a block of Marguerite stitch in it surrounded by something else. I have to figure out the something else.

I try to faithfully work one row of this project everyday, which is faster on the set up row days and much slower and yarn eating on the second row of the pattern days. I may be getting to the point at which I can only work half a row on a given day if I still want to have time for other projects. It’s coming just very, very slowly.