WIP Wednesday 50/2018: Back To Life, Back to Reality

Time heals all wounds. Feelings of sadness, disappointment and grief are bound to gradually go away as time passes. Whatever happens to you either you sooner or later just cope with it, or it kills you. Or, in other words: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – at least that’s what they say. And in the end they’re right. I need to get back to life.

After my husband Steve passed away so very unexpectedly on October 12th I was petrified at first, unable to imagine a future without him. He was such an important part of our lives. I simply couldn’t see how we could possibly live our life without him being around. But life goes on, the world keeps on spinning, and we – our daughter Josephine and me – are still around, very much alive and looking forward to a future. It’s a future without Steve but it’s still worth to be living in. Yes, it would be better with him in it. But we got no choice, so here we are.

Let’s get back to life.

Back to Life

If you’re my age or older it’s very likely you know the song Back to Life from the 80s pop band Soul II Soul. Remember it? If not, go and take a look and listen to it eventually. The lyrics describe pretty well how I feel currently.

Getting back to life means getting back to knitting and designing, at least for me. After the funeral friends took me to Berlin, my old home town, to get some rest and find peace. We arrived Saturday evening, and the first thing I did on Monday was to visit my favourite local yarn shop in Kreuzberg: Needles & Pins.

Work in Progress: An Adjustable Lace Shawl

I found some lovely natural brown Merino lace yarn, Lang Yarns Merino 400 Lace there and I bought four skeins, already planning a new shawl design in my head. I wanted it to be adjustable so it could be knitted in any yarn, and any size. My first choice was to knit a triangle worked sideways, starting with a garter stitch section and adding some lace stitch pattern later.

Looking at this project in terms of my shawl design trinity I started with yarn and chose shape (triangle worked sideways) and stitch pattern (garter stitch and lace) afterwards.

As the yarn colour is solid I didn’t have to pay much attention to the delicacy of the stitch pattern – everything would look pretty no matter how complicated – but I wanted a rather simple stitch pattern because, honestly, I still can’t imagine concentrating on something really complicated.

The pattern I selected is a simple 8×6 stitch repeat. The chart and its legend are shown below.

And this is how it looks like when it’s finally knitted.

To design a triangle shawl worked sideways with a rectangle chart I had to make some adjustments first. The most important question here is: How do you adapt a stitch pattern given as a rectangle to fit a triangle shawl with a certain rate of increases – in our case, one increase every other row?

Indeed, thats a bit tricky. I outlined the principles of adapting stitch patterns in my article series Adapting Stitch Patterns to Shawl Shapes I wrote last year. (If you need details, please have a look there to find out more.)

The main focus points in designing this shawl were

1. not to run out of yarn in the middle of the design, and
2. to turn a rectangular stitch pattern into a working pattern for a triangle worked sideways.

We’ll look at both aspects in the next few articles here on this blog – thats’ what we’re focusing on in the coming weeks (okay, besides Holiday Knitting): Adjustable Shawls and how to knit (and design) them.

For now, I’m finishing this one – and preparing for upcoming exams. (Yes, I’m still in Med School.) I’m still thinking about how to name this one – any suggestions? Please let me know by leaving a comment below!

See you tomorrow, and happy knitting!

Julia <3