A Curious Statistical Anomaly

I’ve been puttering about slowly working on my Lady Eleanor. I like shawls. They’re great to wrap up in on a chilly evening. We’ve got a wall of windows in the living room and since we’re in Maryland — they’re not insulated. We’ve added that insulating film to all the ones we could reach easily but it still cools off in the winter and we don’t turn up the heat, so shawls are a must. I was looking for something a bit bigger and warmer than the usual shawl when I saw the Lady Eleanor.

I’d never done entrelac before, but I liked the way it looked. The other thing I really liked was the way the color shifts worked for the blocks. I checked out the yarn from the pattern and with my budget I just couldn’t swing it. I looked around and swatched a few different variegated yarns and ended up using Caron’s Simply Soft Shadows. I didn’t do a swatch for gauge — I was swatching for the color changes and happily it seems to come out the appropriate size for the shawl to be nice and cuddly on a cold winter night.

I found that once you set up the first row and the second that picking up the pattern and memorizing it is quite easy and then you can travel with this project without bringing the book. However, I did type up the square and the edge on a half sheet of paper to bring in the bag in case I forgot what I was doing. The other skill that I’d been meaning to learn but hadn’t taken the time to practice was knitting backwards. If you’re doing entrelac, it really does make sense to knit backwards rather than turning on a purl side. Once I figured out what I was doing it wasn’t so bad. The trick was to keep my tension the same whether knitting left to right or right to left.

Since this is for me I don’t need to worry about having it done for Christmas but I’m hoping to have it finished in January. But we’ll have to see whether that comes about with all my other projects in the queue.