Kid Mohair Wrap Post-Mortem

Well, this wanted to be a pretty lace wrap, but -- alas.

It is the Kid Mohair Wrap from Susan Cropper's Pretty Knits: 30 Designs from Loop in London of 2007, reprinted in Canadian Living a year or so ago (there's no date!).  I was a little surprised to find almost no mention of this around the blogosphere, thinking that surely I could not be the only one seduced by the photograph.  I wonder now if knitters just gave up.

As I mentioned before, there are a few errors in the border pattern, not earth-shattering ones, but enough to be worth fixing.

This is a fairly-standard lace edging, found in Martha Waterman's Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls, among others I'm sure, and there called "Ocean Waves".  Here it is written worked in opposite directions on the right and left edges, so that they are mirror images.  The right-side edge has a three-stitch "wave" that swirls upwards towards the left, while as written here in the Kid Mohair Wrap the left-side edge has a two-stitch swirl.  It is not entirely noticeable at this lacy gauge, which is one of the reasons (the other being Kidsilk Haze's resistance to being picked out and re-knitted) that I simply left it there and went on.  The decrease used in the pattern is a left-slanting sl1-K1-psso, but it should be a right-slanting K2tog.  I worked the second repeat this way, and to my eye it looks much better, certainly a mirror image of the right-side border.  After working the second repeat, I realized that the one triple-decrease on the left-side border should be changed as well, from a sl1-K2tog-psso to a K3tog -- you can see the second repeat's sl1-K2tog-psso at the top of the first "swirl", just to the left of the last yarn-over hole, where the triple decrease is leaning the wrong way.  I worked a K3tog instead on the third repeat, along with the line of K2togs, and it looks much tidier.

So my recommendations: In Row 3, change the second sl1-K2tog-psso to K3tog, AND in Rows 5, 7, 9, and 11, change the second "skpo" (i.e. sl1-K1-psso) to a K2tog.  This will also need to be changed in the crossed-eyelet section, thus: In Row 31, change the second sl1-K2tog-psso to K3tog, AND in Rows 33, 35, 37, and 39, change the second "skpo" (i.e. sl1-K1-psso) to a K2tog.  There is another typo in Row 35: after the second "slip marker", K2 should be K3.

There also should be an asterisk in Row 39, after the first "slip marker", but this is only a slight hiccup.

The scarf version apparently simply continues a narrower version of the knot-stitch section all the way up, omitting the crossed-eyelet section -- but a commenter on the Canadian Living version of the pattern notes that Row 28 in the scarf version says to repeat Row 14, ie. Row 4 of the knot-stich pattern, but that this should be Row 2, not Row 4.

But the biggest problem for me is that two balls of Kidsilk Haze is not enough by some way to complete a 30x60-inch wrap.  I pin-blocked what I had worked so far to a 30-inch/76cm width, which to me looked far too stretched, so I repinned it to what looked good, which was 28 inches (71 cm) wide -- although certainly this was not proper blocking, and the results may have been different, but I suspect not much.  The result was a 28x22-inch piece, which of course with only one more ball of Kidsilk Haze would not have made a wrap that measured 60 inches by any means.

So, well -- it's pretty, but the yarn is now well on its way to becoming nona's Tie One On after all ...

Comments

[Mary Lou]

And after all that work! Could you find another ball of that dye lot KSH?

[Wendy]

Oh my dear, how to frog this stuff?? Good luck! How about just casting off and making a pretty table decoration?

[Karen]

Hi there! I'm many years behind but just am trying the knit and found your comment on the Canadian Living page... I wanted to THANK YOU! I thought I was going crazy... I counted so many times and always seemed off...! Thanks again for posting your suggested fix!!!