Image by jdkcubed via FlickrBeing a member on Ravelry has its advantages. One of those advantages is exposure to projects you might not otherwise do. Case is point is my current "hot" project.I started a knitted lace shawl. I am a big guy with, as I term them, Ham Hands. I cannot work with things that are too small or it is just to hard for me. Lace has always fallen into that category. My impression was very, fine needles, very fine yarn, tiny stitches..you get my drift. Just to small to fiddley or me to manage.
So back to Ravelry. I associate with a local group called Pints and Purls. They meet on Monday evenings at the local brew pub and work on our current projects. Some knit, some crochet. This group maintains a group/forum on Ravelry of the same name (Pinst N Purls). One of the recent discussions was about maybe doing a small simple knit along project for beginners and experts alike. Out of this conversation came the fact that a couple of folks had planned their own knit a long for october of this knitted shawl.
The name of the shawl's pattern was Haruni. it was a freee pattern available on Ravelry. So I checked it out and immediately though no way, lace, small needles, ham hands, no no no....Then I downloaded the pattern and read through it. It used a light weight yarn (lace or fingering or....you got it SOCK YARN) and size US 4 needles!!!
I make socks with size US 3! With SOCK YARN...I theoretically could do this shawl! So I saved the pattern, bought some nice paton's lace yarn (which is "bigger" than sock yarn LOL). So the point is don't build walls for yourself. This shawl is doable by me but only because others made me look into it, pay attention to the details long enough to realize I was more than capable of it.
