I’ve been knitting a Flutter Scarf for my mother for Christmas. Ok, I lie. It was for her birthday, but I discovered, shockingly, that I couldn’t knit as fast as I thought that I could. So, since her birthday was yesterday and the scarf is only 1/3 of the way done, it has become a Christmas gift.
This reminded me of other “Christmas” gifts I’d like to make. Like my Forget-Me-Not Shawl for my grandmother. I’m not in the mood to wrestle anymore with mohair this week, so I decided to look up a nice cast-on, pick a number, and start knitting some soothing rows of stockinette stitch. I feel that this project would make me feel accomplished because I could get through 100 rows of stockinette in a finger-snap. Unfortunately, there are multiple methods of casting on. I’m undecided which is better and what I should use, or how many rows of a knitted border I should have.
So I moved onto looking for examples of the lace pattern – the Shetland cat’s paw lace. The cat’s paw lace creates six holes that resemble petals, and even though a forget-me-not flower only has five petals, a cat’s paw only has four main digits, so I think that I can be as “imaginative” as the Scottish people were and say that this is the abstract idea of what a forget-me-not flower looks like.
Unfortunately, there is not one single way to knit the cat’s paw lace pattern. Oh no. It could never be that simple. There are oodles of ways to make the lace pattern that causes the lace holes to shift and slide in different directions. Wendy Knits’ blog has a nice diagram that outlines most of them. And by “nice,” I mean, “it hurts to look at it too long.” Then there are a couple others that involve strange things like k2togtbl that I found other places. So now, before I cast on for anything, I must knit myself multiple little swatches of the Shetland cat’s paw, using all sorts of methods, until I hit on the one that creates the nicest, most round version. headdesk
Exchanging Fire 