FO: Olympic Rose of England Tea Shawl

As you may have guessed, the radio silence has meant that I totally failed to complete my Rose of England by the end of the Olympics. I was going crazy knitting Thursday and Friday before the Olympics ended and realized that I wasn't having any fun. So I eased up, and just enjoyed the ride. It's taken me until today to finish the last dozen or so rows and the crocheted bind off.

Pattern: Rose of England (tea cloth) from Marianne Kinzel's Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting
Yarn: Baruffa Cashwool, most of one hank (~1400 yards)
Needles: Size 6 Knitpicks options, Size B crochet hook for the edging.
Size: Blocked to 58" across, pulled back some once off the pins

Kinzel's pattern is clear and well written, but that didn't stop me from having trouble wrapping my head around it. The charts have a slightly different style from most modern lace charts, which threw me for a bit of a loop. Then there's the matter of casting on for such a small diameter, which is always a bit tricky.

After the first day of knitting, I found that I had completely missed... something. I'm still not sure exactly what happened, but I had to rip out completely and start over. So I lost some time there. It was all pretty much smooth sailing after that. Except for the problem of the Extremely Long Rows toward the end. And that was just a problem of inertia. I did get hung up a bit at the crocheted edging, but after reviewing multiple instructions on how to do a double crochet, I found About.com's the most useful, and off I went.

The yarn was lovely. It's been in my stash for years, and I was glad to use the Olympics as a chance to use it up. I didn't run into any knots or slubs, which is very nice over that length of yarn.

Preblocking, the usual crumpled mess:


Blocking. It took all my T-pins, and most of the safety pins I could dig up to pin out the crocheted loop edging.


Draped over a chair:


Hanging off the side of the fridge:


Edging details:



Center details:



And now onto the next!