Pattern: Palimpsest by Anne Hansen
Yarn: Knit Picks Alpaca Cloud in the Horizon colorway
Needles: Size 4 circs
Wow. In checking my notes, I cast this on on the last day of May. So it’s been slightly more than two months. I can’t believe I’ve managed that much project monogamy in that time.
This was a really good pattern to work with. I’m going to give it intermediate status – because you really need to make sure you’re comfortable with charts before attempting this. It’s true lace, with the lace pattern on both sides, and though that’s not hard to do, it does require a bit more paying attention than knowing you’re just going to be purling every other row. With that in mind, I’d say this would be a good pattern to do for a first true lace pattern – it’s otherwise simple.
It did hit my sweet spot for not too boring – it’s a 24 row pattern, so I seldom managed to do one complete pattern repeat in one sitting. I did manage to memorize it towards the end, but that actually took me a little while.
I really enjoyed working with this yarn. Sadly, the colorway itself is discontinued (I bought it a long time ago, in my early days of a little more optimism than my level of skill at the time warranted. It’s been sitting waiting for the right project for a couple of years.) It’s butter soft, and really warm.
I’m not overly proud of the cast off. It’s way too tight, and I wove the ends in so well that I can’t go back and do it again. I think blocking will be ok (I can work around the tightness), but if I had it to do over, I’d go up a couple needle sizes to cast off.
My other big issue is going to be blocking this puppy. I don’t have a long enough surface for it, and I don’t think I currently own enough pins to get all the points in the edging blocked individually. So this might be waiting a little while to get blocked.
ETA: Blocked photos are here.