Not Quite My Target

Try as I might, I did not get as far as I hoped to on my lace.  

I knit my heart out on Saturday and made it round the corner.  Sunday I knit till I just couldn't knit anymore.  

There are about two and a half repeats of lace left to go before the corner and then one repeat for the corner and the graft.  So I am close, so close.  Sigh

But not done.  Oh well, it will happen today.  Or tomorrow.  My hand, which seemed to be healing wonderfully well, flared up and is a little tender again.  I'm pretty sure it isn't the lace doing it.  Working the lace always seems to make my hand feel better as if the muscles are excercized in just the right way.  I am starting to wonder if the pain comes from more than just a computer keyboard that is far too high.  I wonder if the tea cozies weren't exacerbating it.

The tea cozies were done with a Addi Short Lace tips, 4.5 mm and the shortest cable in the set.  It makes a 16 inch needle.  At that number of stitches, it was a little tight, but it was much better than working with a slightly longer cord and having too few stitches. Still, it was knitting that was onlly good for here and there knitting.  Saturday mornings finishing Tea Five, probably made things flare up.  I had a lot of fun getting rid of that bag of yarn but I do not like what it may have cost me.  If I do a big chunk of small diameter knitting again, I am sticking to dpns.

One other distressing thing about this lovely shawl.  

I had to start ball 5 just after I turned corner to the fourth and final side.  I have used a distressingly large amount of yarn working down the side, a little more than one quarter of the ball. By the time I am done, I will be close, but not quite to using up half this fifth skein.

Which is a bit of a bugger because I was going to make another just like this for me. I really don't want to buy more yarn but there is one possible option, a fall back if you will, that, if I am lucky, I could get away with on my own version.  I have one single skein of Durasport in the same colour.  Its close enough that sitting side by side, I can't see the difference, but I won't really know till I start knitting a swatch.  And, I am not 100 percent sure that it would perform the same in a shawl.  It may be that I have to switch my colours around and it may be that my dream shawl will become a sweater.  That is not a bad thought at all.

Time will tell, and it will be fun contemplating in the mean time.