Amazing Lace: Introducing the team

With some trepidation, I've signed up for the Amazing Lace summer knitalong. I've never knitted a lace project and the odd sample I've tried has not been inspiring. My natural preference is to knit with worsted yarn, and the skinny stuff scares me. However, I've seen so many beautiful shawls online, and a shawl does seem to be the perfect summer project. Even in England, it's too warm to wear cosy wool jumpers in the summer, but the evenings are rarely warm enough to go out without a cover up.

Team trials were held yesterday, and resulted in a couple of shock changes to the team.

The probable team before trials:

The pattern - Magknits Cobweb shawl. An ambitious project for this first attempt at lace knitting, but hey, let's go for it. No charts, and a pattern repeat that doesn't look too daunting.
The yarn - Handpaintedyarn lace weight in . The yarn has more experience than the knitter, and I'm hoping will calm the nerves of the other team members
The needles - Bamboo 80 cm circulars, size to be determined in trials

Trial results:

Sadly, the pattern performed poorly under stress conditions. Although easy to remember, the sheer quantity of yarnovers made it a tricky team member that it did not co-operate very well with the yarn and knitter. A more experienced team captain could pull it off, but as we're not in a position to change the captain, the pattern is off the team! In its place is likely to be an elann pattern, more difficult to follow, but with less lace. The starting contender will be the Garden Path shawl, but may be substituted if early training sessions are unsuccessful.

The yarn was as successful as expected, and will be a key member of the team. It's easy to handle, flexible and not splitty.


There was a tough battle to find the final team member, the needles. Early frontrunner was the bamboo circulars but the blunt tip and grabbiness was not a success. Next up was the other extreme, slippy Addis. But no, not much better. The points were still too blunt, I made the stitches too tight, and they kept falling off. The final candidate was much better, Denise needles in 4mm. I tried a few different needles sizes, but settled on 4mm as this seemed to give me the degree of laciness I wanted (although no idea what size the final shawl will now end up).

So, to recap, the team is now:

Garden Path pattern
Denise 4mm circular needles
Handpainted laceweight yarn
and of course, the knitter.

Congratulations to the team members; let's get into training!