FFFO

[firecat]

I have a Finally Fucking Finished Object (FFFO), a version of Branching Out by Susan Pierce Lawrence on the Knitty web site.

I've had it on the needles since August or so.

I wasn't actively knitting it that whole time, but I had a very difficult time with it and probably knit about twice as many pattern repeats as ended up in my finished scarf. If this is "easy lace" (as billed on Knitty) then I'm not cut out to be a lace knitter.

(I haven't given up on knitted lace yet though.)

It's made out of some mystery yarn on a cone that I got in a Newton's Yarn Country sale. The yarn is soft, light and fluffy. It's not very elastic (and therefore not the smartest yarn to use for a first lace project. Oh well). My swatch was completely unaffected by the washer and dryer so I don't think the scarf is going to be "blockable" per se.

There are still a lot of mistakes—but most of them are relatively invisible, even to me. The one that isn't invisible (but I'm too lazy to fix) is that the first 1/4 of the scarf is "inside out." I noticed quite a while later that I had switched the right side and wrong side rows. It's still probably not noticeable to anyone but another knitter.

Design decisions as a result of mistakes department:

I hopelessly fouled things up around 1/3 of the way into the scarf and "fixed" it by knitting some rows of garter stitch and starting over. So then I knit another chunk of garter stitch 2/3 of the way along.




branching-out_03-04-07
Originally uploaded by firecatstef.



branching-out-full
Originally uploaded by firecatstef.

Comments

[sev]

wow, gorgeous! And I love the garter stripes.

I've also heard people call Branching Out a good beginner's lace, and I think they're insane. I consider myself a lace knitter and that pattern intimidates me a bit. Sure, it's a big rectangle, and that makes it sort of conceptually easier than, say, a triangular or circular shawl...but I'd rather do any shape with a lace pattern that's predictable enough that I can eventually put away the chart.

That's what I so loved about Knitty's Ella pattern (in the triangular, not the v-shaped version) -- once I put stitch markers at the center of each repeat, the pattern made lots of sense and I could figure out the next row from the previous row. I guess in general that's why I like geometric lace instead of viny stuff.

I did my first lace project (also a scaref, but in the feather-and-fan lace pattern, which *is* an easy one) from a cone of mystery yarn.

[firecat]

Thanks, I'm glad you agree that it's not necessarily an easy pattern. Actually another LJ person I talked to about Branching Out said the same thing and also mentioned that Ella was easier.

I'm already planning my next lace project and it won't be viney.