Sunday, April 04, 2010

Blue Ribbon

I can't believe this but I won a first prize for the Sun Ray shawl at the Sydney Royal Easter Show.

Adriatic Sun Ray

This was the Sun Ray shawl by Marianne Kinzel from her book The First Book of Modern Lace Knitting. When I set out to do this I wanted to choose something that was challenging to knit and also had a varied enough pattern so I wouldn't get bored. This project was definitely both.

The yarn is the 2/36NM cashmere in Adriatic Blue from Colourmart, held doubled. I used 3mm circular KnitPicks.

Altogether I would probably describe the experience as nail biting. When I started the shawl in the new year, I never thought I would still be blocking it on the eve of submission day.

Nor did I anticipate running out of yarn with half the final round to go plus the bind off. I couldn't find any more of the same colour on the Colourmart website and out of desperation emailed them directly. Thankfully Sue at Colourmart found some and sent it to me FOR FREE. How generous is that? I received the extra yarn on the Tuesday before the Saturday deadline.

One of these days I'll work out how many stitches went into this. The final rounds which had over 2,000 stitches took me well over 2 hours each! I know the crochet bind off was roughly 4,800 stitches and that alone took me 2 nights. Didn't help that I don't really know how to crochet.

Here's a pic of the display in the category. I must say the competition was pretty stiff - especially that beautiful white shawl that came second.

Adriatic Sun Ray 2

A couple more pics on Ravelry.