Knitting a Stargate

At least, that's what it looks like while I'm knitting it.

I've had this ball of Elegant Yarns' Daphne in my stash for a couple of years, and for some reason I suddenly urgently needed to knit some kind of shawl/scarf/stole thing out of it.

Knitting mojo, go figure.

It goes away for a couple of months, and when it comes back it's got all these extravagant plans, like an eccentric aunt who visits at odd intervals and gives you a shopping bag stuffed with an old mink opera cape and tickets to the closest concert.

Or another version of the Idea Pterodactyl.(This is Fay Wray being carried off by the pterodactyl in the original King Kong.)

This yarn is a thin two-ply with each ply gradually changing color. It reminds me of the iridescence on a soap bubble.

With all the color going on, the lace pattern isn't going to show up very well, so I picked something fairly simple: "Lilac Time," from Marianne Kinzel's Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting. In the pattern, she has you knit this in the round, from the center out, then sew up the center slit.

I did not want to mess with sewing up a yarn this fine, never mind that I would never get the colors to match, so I played around with a prototype in cotton string and worked a variation of Judy Becker's magic cast on.

When I knitted the first plain round, I deliberately twisted the stitches in opposite directions to make a mock sewing line. Which . . . doesn't really show up in this photo.

At first this felt like the hardest thing I've ever done. But now my hands seem to have calibrated, and it's just like any old lace knitting: follow the chart, make sure the repeats have the right number of stitches, try not to drop any.

It's been excellent knitting, sitting next to the new soapstone stove, for the last couple of very windy days.