Orchid Thief

Last weekend, Mo was the gracious host at her mom's cottage. On the way we picked up the 15 3/4" LeClerc Dorothy loom in Belleville that I had found on Kijiji. The only thing that didn't come with it was a raddle but I had one that I fashioned to use with the loom I had borrowed from Paula. It is a table loom that folds up to a relatively compact size - 16" x 24" x 8". My mind is swimming with stuff I want to try weaving.

Then we went to Picton for lunch and to explore a couple of the cute shops. Once at the cottage, we began our knitting in earnest. Mo was designing a shawl she wanted to knit for her mother. I started knitting Orchid Thief using a skein of my handspun.

It knits up pretty quickly and I got everything but the leafy border done before we headed for home. The setup row (Row 86) for the border kicked my ass. I couldn't seem to interpret the chart nor the written instructions. Thank goodness cmari on Ravelry had created a chart for this row.

Once I got that done I progressed pretty quickly. Of course, the rows got longer and longer but I finished binding off last night and blocked it this morning. I ran wires through the centre spine and through the eyelet radiating from the points of the leaves at the neck. Basically, it is a triangular shawl with a big, leafy border and additional half segments on either side of the hypotenuse of the triangle.

Then I pinned the points of the leaves and the diamonds. It dried pretty quickly.

I got a couple of photos outside before we lost the necessary light.

I like the leaf detail at the back of the neck.
It sits nicely on the shoulders.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. This was a good project for this particular skein of handspun.

I used almost 470 yards and 105g of yarn so beware, anyone who wants to knit this shawl, you will need more than a standard 100g skein of fingering weight yarn. Also, check the errata page. There were a couple of errors on the first edition of this pattern.