Friday, July 06, 2007

Get a Clue! MS3 clue 1 finished

Did I mention that after I decided not to start MS3 until I finished the cardi? Well, I finished the thing and cast on for MS3.

Materials:

2 skeins of elann.com Peruvian Baby Lace Merino in parchment.
1 tube of pearly white #8 beads (a pain to find)
1 32" US3 Addi Lace turbo
1 #13 crochet hook


I wanted to do the bead thing with this stole because I've not knitted with beads and I thought this would be interesting.

So, first off, procurement of materials.
YARN: I had black laceweight yarn and some pale-ish colors, but I didn't have white/off-white yarn. Oh, I take that back. When we were up in Oregon last year, I got a ball of alpaca laceweight, but there wasn't enough yardage (yeah, that's it...not enough yardage...). btw, they're now out of the parchment color.

NEEDLES: I wanted to check out Addi Lace Turbos so I went to my LYS (Article Pract) and they actually had it on sale. Of course, they had mislabeled the needles so I thought I was getting an even better deal...sigh...but it's still pretty good.

BEADS: I checked every big box store in the area for the right size beads -- to no avail. Okay, I found red #8 seed beads at J's but I didn't want a huge contrast. I then went 'Doh!' and remembered that there's actually a bead store on the island. I'm sure I was annoying the ladies at the store because I couldn't decide between 2 colors. I guess I could have bought both, but that would have been extra lame. I settled on the pearly off-white.

CROCHET HOOK: Okay, lesson learned the hard way. For one night, I couldn't find my crochet hooks and ended up fashioning a bit of 20 gauge wire into a hook device thingie and used that to get beads on. Then I found my crochet hooks only to realize that the smallest size crochet hook I own is 12. That hook looked itty bitty, but only ~15% of the beads slipped over okay. I sorted through the beads to find the ones that would fit over the hook. So, I limped along using a crochet hook that was too big. So, yesterday, I broke down and went to Lacis in Berkeley (yes, I know how lucky I am that this store is in my hood) and purchased a hook for less than $2. Oh, drats! if I'd know how cheap hooks were, I would have gone by there earlier. I purchased a 13 and got home and read that I should have gotten a 14. Oh, well. The great news is that all the beads fit on this size. YES!

I did have to tink back 4 rows yesterday because I realized that I made an error the night before. Yes, I tried knitting this after we got home from watching fireworks -- very lame. Note to self: do not knit lace when exhausted. The only other thing is that I forgot 1 bead in the center. I'm not sure how I did that, but I wasn't about to rip back 8 rows to replace it.

We received Clue 2 today. After a bit of yahoo group reading, I thought I should put in a lifeline before I started clue 2. Yeah, well. Putting in that lifeline? yep, I screwed up somewhere. Need to figure out where I went wrong on 1st row of clue 2. It figures...

2 comments:

Diane said...

Your MS3 is really pretty. I love to see everyone else's work on MS3. Isn't it funny how the same pattern can look so different just based on the yarn and needle size. Hopefully I'll get around to starting mine in a week or two.

fleegle said...

How do you like the Elann yarn?