Mission Knitting: Test Knit

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to be a test knitter for a woman who designs nice knitted items.  The pattern is a shawl with some lace work and the rest garter stitch.  Seemed like a great idea.  After all, I only have two other major-ish projects already started.  What is one more?!

This shawl calls for fingering weight yarn, which I had to purchase.  It also requires a long tail picot cast with MANY MANY stitches...over 400.  Yikes!

The designer is a very nice lady, but she has a very quick deadline. I told her I would love to knit her shawl but I was certain I could not get it done by the deadline.  She said works-in-progress photos would still be useful to her.

So I started in.  Turns out I did not know how to do a long tail picot cast on.  YouTube did not know how, either.  I racked my brain and came up with what might work, but it looked NOTHING like the picot edge the designer pictured in her sample shawl.  So, head in hand I went to Ravelry and found a group for the test knitters where I placed the question.  Turns out, my crackpot idea for how to do it was correct.  Can you believe it?!!

Well, fourth try is a charm, right?!  So, now to cast on all those stitches.  The long tail was truly long, but when I had cast on 300 stitches, I realized I did NOT have enough long tail to work with.  At just about that time, the designer sent out a new email saying that we needed an 8-yard long tail, not the 5-yard tail previously mentioned. Ugh!

This is all the stitches on a too-short cable needle. I will most likely buy a longer one at some point down the road on this project.  After I decide if I really need it.  It looks like a clump of yarn, but there really is a pattern there.

It turns out I only got in 340 stitches with the length of long tail I had.  Because I was sure to pull out my hair if I had to start again, I decided, since it was not going to be done by the deadline anyway, that I would just use the stitches I had and make the pattern work somehow.

This picture shows the first three rows (of eight) of the first pattern repeat.  A better picture than above.

Well, actually, only a marginally better picture.  Can you see a couple little picots there about where the stitching is on the back of the chair?

You will notice the colorful yarn markers.  Whenever I have scraps of yarn leftover, instead of throwing them away, I turn them into yarn markers. (Another thing I do is graft scraps together and build a VERY variegated ball of yarn.)  These markers stay on the needles better than the cool commercial ones, and if they get lost or unravel, well, they were just yarn scraps and there will always be more so I do not mind disposing of them.

So...the shawl is started.  Because it is a lace pattern at the beginning, I won't be able to take it with me for "keep-my-hands-busy-and-out-of-the-food" trips and events.  Those trips I have to stick with something very simple and easy and repetitive where I have memorized the pattern.

Now it is nine days until the shawl is supposed to be done.  I will post my work-in-progress (WIP) when the nine days is up.  If the old gray matter upstairs is functioning at any kind of reasonable level.  Otherwise, well, I will just post when I think of it!