(The Saga of) Ashby

Finishing Ashby, a Brooklyn Tweed design by Leila Raabe, took much, much longer than it should have.

The triangular shawl is knitted from the outside in, first by working the cabled border, then by picking up stitches and filling the body. Ashby is an incredibly gorgeous shawl; it's among the most beautiful things I've made. And it's not a particularly difficult knit either, as long as you pay attention to the direction in which your cables travel. And have enough yarn.

I had knitted the border in no time and was one fourth into the body when, ahhh!!, it became obvious that I was going to run out of yarn.

The pattern calls for 700-740 yards of worsted weight yarn, and rather than going with BT's Shelter I chose Imperial Yarn's Columbia to achieve a more rustic look. Somehow I had "Montana" on my mind when choosing the yarn. My LYS carried three skeins in that rustic, Montana-ian yellow my heart was set on, and an employee* offered to give me her leftover yarn--another 1/2 of a skein--for a total of about 770 yards. No problem there, right?

Right. Only, it didn't work. I had just a little over one skein left for the body and knew it wasn't enough. In the meantime my LYS had received another shipment of Imperial Columbia, alas, the color "Wheat Heather" came from a different dye lot and looked much more yellow. Nothing like a good challenge, the owner of my LYS decided, and together with a few other gals she started calling and emailing everybody: folks who'd previously bought "my" dye lot at the store, online retailers of Imperial, Imperial itself, Ravelry stashers of Imperial, trying to hunt down one skein in the correct dye lot. After three weeks--three weeks!--I had enough, called off the rescue team, and bought a skein from the different dye lot. And of course, the two dye lots clashed.

(Can you see the difference? I can't see it on my computer screen, but it's very visible on my iPad. Blimme, it was very visible in natura, too).

Not only was the color different, the new skein also felt different: it was softer, bulkier, less Montana and more Kansas.

What choice did I have but to rip back the entire body? It seemed painful at the time. In the end it took all but one rainy Memorial Day weekend, in which we were trapped indoors, to redo the body, alternating rows between the old and the new skein, hoping for the best: a non-stripy but happy marriage between two differently colored and differently structured strands of yarn.

On a cloudy day, the attentive eye detects stripes. Surely, the difference in color between the border and the body is noticeable. But again, only to the attentive eye, probably to one belonging to a fellow-knitter.

But on a sunny day? Perfect. Stunning.

I gotta say, I really, really love my Ashby. I can't wait for that cold autumn evening when I will first wear it, probably while cradling my new-born baby boy.

***

Why exactly I ran out of yarn is beyond me. I got gauge, I had good yardage. I used up almost all of the new skein, that is, there are 900 yards in that puppy, not 740. Mistake by the designer? I'm sure others would have complained about it. Incorrect yardage stated on the yarn label? That would be mean. Do I knit too loosely? But I got gauge!! Hmpf. Who knows, and, looking at Ashby, who cares?


*This sounds awfully impersonal. I'm talking about Chris, who is awesome, both as a knitter and as a person.