Pearls Before A Dumbass

I may have mentioned earlier that I have knitting ADD. In the interests of keeping me interested (if you will), I decided to knit Brenda Patipa's "Pearls of Wisdom" shawl.

[Photos borrowed with permission from Lisa Souza's site. Buy this pattern.]

I bought the pattern at Stitches West '07, and thought it was the coolest thing EVER. I don't like bobbles, yet loved the "nupp"iness of it. I love how the pattern moves, and the variegated yarn is showcased without overwhelming the lace.

Until now, my personal rule has been:

Variegated yarn ≠ lace

This has been a long-held Jasmin rule; why do all that lace work if it won't show? In any case, due to the perfect matchi-ness of the Sea Silk to the fabric (and Hollis's encouragement), I took a leap of faith and the Print O' The Wave shows fine in the lace.

I knew "Pearls of Wisdom" would look lovely variegated- I saw the sample in person. There's no deception when you can fondle the original, folks.

"Pearls of Wisdom" also violated one of my other long-held, hard-and-fast rules:

Bobbles/nupps= nipples

The nupps are EVERYWHERE and bear not even the slightest resemblance to nipples. Eight per right side row, in fact. Now, compared to the total stitch count (a little over a hundred stitches, give or take), eight stitches is less than 10% of the total right side row stitches. Totally do-able, right?

(Brenda Patipa is a genius, and I am a slightly dim knitter. Any commentary on the misery of the pattern is my personal brain-dead ness/ lack of mad skillz, yo.)

Sure. Except that on the first row my nupps are MIA. I used my normal tension on them and had a MISERABLE time pulling the extra stitches over. Elphie felt my pain and laid down on the couch next to me. She's my "comforter" spaniel (mix).

In the subsequent rows, I have been knitting all the "extra" stitches much looser and the last stitch much tighter, and that seems to help with the nupp definition. But these nupps are taking me… a while.