Two Shawl or not Two Shawl

I started two shawls the other day. I must have a severe case of startitis.

Shawl #1 is the Three-Cornered Shawl from Victorian Lace Today and starts with a backward loop cast on of 600 stitches. I must be nuts.

 

Yarn is from Gypsy Yarn, a small shop in Boulder that we happened upon while strolling down the street. I popped in for just a sec, came out with a skein of lace weight merino. My husband performed the appropriate eye-rolling exercise, knowing that I already have if not one, then perhaps two skeins of lace weight at home. (Ok, maybe more than two.) (Side note: we spent a day and a half in Boulder and it wasn't until we were back home that I remembered that there is a HUGE spinning/weaving/yarn store there that I have never been to and never even thought about.)

Photo shows the cast on. The next row is a pattern row. Knitting into a backwards loop cast on is hard enough without adding K2tog to it. I bagged that, and did one row of purl, then started with the pattern row.  I checked Ravelry for other intrepid knitters, and at least two said they used a different cast on, but didn't say what they had done instead. I was knitting this wearing magnifying glasses and hoping that once the pattern was working, I could switch to regular glasses, but I never got that far. Needle is an Inox lace needle, which had the best point, but I'm not really happy with it for this size yarn.

Shawl number two is Miralda from Knitted Lace of Estonia by Nancy Bush. I liked the shawl, did some stash diving to find the right yarn, and came up with almost the exact yarn she had used. Hers is 100% Polwarth, mine is Polwarth and silk. Yummy.

 

Shawl #2 is progressing nicely.

Shawl #1 died a quick death. I had slightly less yarn than called for and a note on Ravelry said that many shawls from this book required more yarn than listed, so I decided to reduce the width by one repeat on each side. I recalculated numbers, then carefully knit the first, second and third rows and was about to start number four when I realized that I had knit the pattern stitch all the way across the row without marking the center stitch and without knitting the center pattern. Thus,the center of the shawl didn't have the needed decreases. I was hoping to just fix the center stitches, but that didn't work out, so it was ripped.  

I cast on again with a larger needle using a long tail cast on, but quickly realized that this cast-on doesn't produce the same effect along the edge. I cast on again this morning with the backwards loop but reversed the direction of the loops, hoping that they will be easier to pick up. 

With shawl #2 behaving well, my enthusiasm for shawl #1 is waning. If this cast on doesn't work, the yarn will take a time out (or I will).