By So I started that boarder chart of the Echo Flowers Shawl not long ago feeling like “wow, I’m coming to an end quickly now!”
If only it was that easy. Since between me and that finished shawl a nasty little obstacle had built up: devilish, mean, unnerving things called “nupps”.
I did realize that in order to knit all those beautiful Estonian lace shawls I would have to master nupps at some point, so I was rather curious when I did the first row of nupps. In fact it kept me up till unspoken times in the night because I couldn’t bring myself to do it the day after. Row 1 of the nupps (the knit row) was not problem. It’s the same thing I had done a zillion of times during the flowers pattern anyhow. I did even try to give it extra-low pressure, but obviously didn’t pay enough attention.
Since as soon as I reached the purl row those nupps turned into evil entities out to destroy my knitting – and my hand. For out of forcing the needle through all those slings of yarn produced a row earlier made my hand hurt before I even reached the end of the row! OUCH. Not even thinking about doing another row just afterwards. Those hands needed a serious rest after the Battle Against Evil Nupps.
Everybody who is knitting the Echo Flowers Shawl and hasn’t knitted nupps before please take that one advice from me: Knit your nupps really, really, loosely! Don’t pull too much on the yarn. Give it all the air you can get in there and your nupps will be so much more beautiful and so much easier to do! (And that’s from me, who usually has to pay extra attention the stitches don’t just fall off the needles for she knits so loosely …)
However this is what it looked like once I had gotten through that row-of-hell:
There are Good Nupps …
… and there are Bad Nupps.
tough I have to admit I’m glad the Good Nupps outnumber the Bad Nupps thereby giving me hope that I’ll eventually, one day, get the clue of it. Well … given how many nupps remain on this chart I better hurry up doing so … though right now I’m a little scared of all of them *irgs*
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My Echo Flower is blocking right now. Will share pictures tomorrow. Most of “problematic” nupps blocked out, but not all of them. As it turns out, I bound off too tightly too (even though I went up to a size 13 needle to bind off, and did the ptog method). What that means is….my leaves didn’t block out to leaves…ya know, with the nice little points. No matter how aggressive I got with it, I just couldn’t get them to block out. I’ve been knitting for almost 7 years, and I’ve NEVER had such struggles. Especially with such a well written pattern.
Though it is good to know that the nupps might block out right your report on binding of scares me a bit … *irgs*
I’m looking forward to your pics!
Namida, who’s going through another row of hand-torturing nupps …