Tuscany drenched

Tuscany is blocking! Well, it’s a mini-Tuscany, since I only had 550 yards. And thank goodness I didn’t have more because I was very ready for this shawl to be completed.

I’m freaking out a little bit, because the yarn is rayon, and I just soaked the daylights out of it. But it has blocking wires, so hopefully they will control any shrinkage. If not, I will have learned a very dear lesson. Aargh.

I think I would rather knit sweaters. Sweaters have pieces. You finish one piece and go on to the next.

Shawls go on and on and on. And then on some more. By the time I bound off, I had 298 stitches on the needle. And if I’d had as much yarn as the pattern called for, I’d have ended up with 372. I was never so glad to run out of yarn.

Here is Tuscany blocking:

This is all the yarn I had left, a total of two feet.

Yeah, I cut that a little too close and was nervously watching that end draw nearer and nearer to my needles as I bound off. Whew.

To get the maximum number of rows out of the yarn I had, I knit until the ball was getting pretty small. Then I measured my remaining yarn by measuring one wrap around my swift, winding the remaining yarn on the swift, then counting the wraps. Then I figured out about how many feet of yarn I was using per knitted row (keeping in mind that each row is two stitches longer than the one before). Finally, I calculated how many more rows I could get out of the yarn I had left.

But it’s hard to estimate how much yarn a bind-off will use, especially a bind-off I haven’t done before. So I had to wing that.

But this bind-off didn’t take more yarn than a regular row, which makes sense because I believe that each stitch is just knit (the equivalent of) one time in the bind-off. But I wasn’t sure about that until I had bound off the last stitch and really did have enough yarn.

Amy Singer, the designer, has us do a Russian bind-off for this shawl. I began binding off loosely, and the edge was almost ruffled, very unruly. I had read that the bind-off for this shawl needs to be tighter, so I ripped back and started binding off again tightly. That worked well and I recommend it. And it was sort of a fun bind-off, if you don’t count my worries about running out of yarn in the middle of the bind-off.

Hopefully the shawl will be dry by Monday evening. I leave town on Tuesday and would like to see it freed from its blocking wire restraints before I go.

I shouldn’t have tackled this shawl so soon after the Clapotis. And I have the Shetland Triangle on my to-do list, but I’ll have to wait awhile before I begin that. Must have time for the memory of mind-numbing repeats to fade.

But the yarn I’ll be using for Shetland Triangle is lovely Handmaiden Casbah—merino & cashmere—and I will be very grateful indeed to return to soft fibers.