A Country Lace Shawl/Ein Bauernspitzenschal

Have you experienced this too: You're learning a new technique, practising and working a lot on it, until you reach a certain level of skill - and then there is no forthcoming anymore. Frustrating!

So you put it aside, you do something else, maybe for quite some time - and when you finally return to this earlier project, all of a sudden you discover that your skills have improved all by themselves while you were busy doing other things! Funny, isn't it?



Last year, I tought myself to card and spin and spent a lot of time with it - still, my yarn always turned out worsted, no matter what I tried to change in order to get it soft and delicate instead.

Anyway, at the end of November I stopped spinning, as there were a lot of Christmas preparations to do - I had decided to knit a whole bunch of scarves for Christmas presents for example - so last week was the first time I felt the urge to get back to my spinning wheel again.

I had an idea in mind to spin a very soft and gentle wool for a lace triangle scarf, or wrap - a warming and comforting something out of natural white Norwegian sheep wool and light-brown baby camel wool which I had carded together - using a very basic and plain lace pattern. A kind of rustic country lace shawl, simple and yet delicate.

And it worked! It is just as soft as I wanted it to be, thin but not too thin, some soft bumps and irregularities here and there for the natural look - and lovely to knit with! I'm not an expert, but I think the main difference is that I now tread more slowly and allow the yarn to go faster into the orifice than before, the whorl set to a medium speed.

I found the simple pattern I'd been looking for in 'Victorian Lace Today' by Jane Sowerby - a wonderful lace pattern book covering it all from the very simplest to the quite complicated ones and illustrated with beautiful photos:



The charts make it easy to find your way through the pattern:



I haven't decided on the final size yet, but I think I would like this shawl to be quite big - and I'm planning to work a special border around it afterwards, probably out of one of Nicky Epstein's gorgeous edge-and border knitting books, which I've discovered lately ... but this will deserve a posting for its own!

(German summary:

Ich habe nicht geahnt, daß man auch beim Spinnen Lernstufen/Lernplateaus haben kann - aber nachdem ich eine mehrmonatige Spinnpause gemacht habe, geht's jetzt sogar viel besser als vorher: statt dem üblichen festen, dicht verzwirbeltem Garn bekomme ich jetzt endlich diese luftig-leichte Wolle, die ich mir für meinen Bauernspitzenschal gewünscht habe ...! Und das Buch ist wirklich Klasse, mit leicht verständlichen Charts zum Nacharbeiten!)