My Potter's Shawl

I was making steady progress on my Potter's Shawl until I hit the "attached edging" stage.

That's when it hit the fan, if you get my drift.

My sister was knitting the same shawl at the same time, so you'd think that if we put our two brains together, that would equal a good, solid one brain, and we'd have been able to figure out the instructions.

Interestingly, although we didn't share our interpretations of the directions with one another, the two of us made the same misinterpretation and gaily knit across 262 stitches without needing to. Not only did I knit across 262 stitches, but I had something over 320 stitches when I was done with that row!

Something was rotten in Denmark, for sure, but we couldn't figure out what it was.

I considered stuffing the pattern and yarn into a paper bag, hiding it in the back of a closet, and trying to forget it had ever existed.

Then I hit upon the idea of contacting the pattern designer.

I fired off an email to Jen Lucas but received no response. At least I thought I'd received no response, which surprised me because pattern designers are usually good about helping their customers out of a mess. (I did receive a response from her about a week later. She'd sent it the day I wrote to her for help, but somehow that message from her wandered around in cyberspace before finally finding its way to my mailbox.)

But thinking the designer would not be responding, I then went to Ravelry and found several members who'd knitted this exact shawl.

Not only had they knitted it, some mentioned that it was an "easy" pattern. That didn't make me feel any better about my thick-headedness.

I selected five or six Potter's Shawl knitters, emailed them, and stated my total confusion with the border of leaves.

Every single one replied, even replied promptly, and every single one offered insightful help. One even took the time to tell me how many stitches should be on my needle at the end of each of each 12-row repeat.

(Knitters are in a class of their own.)

The knitters explained to me that I was now to knit the attached edging perpendicular to the garter stitch body of the shawl. So that was the trick!

I won't say the edging has been a breeze for me, because I seem intent upon doing yarn-overs where they're not needed, and that results in taking out stitches carefully before starting again.

But I'm making progress. The leaf motif is repeated 42 times across the bottom edge of the shawl.

I've got maybe 10 more repeats to go.

But here's my next hurdle. See that little blob of yarn beside the shawl? That's the end of the skein. I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to run out of yarn.


Soon I'll be phoning local yarn shops to see if they carry this yarn. I don't even dare hope they'll have it in the same dye lot.