Sheep to Shawl

This was actually finished a while ago, but it got too darn hot to even THINK about wearing a capelet, so it has been hanging out at home for a while.

The yarn is a skein of handspun yarn I bought at Colonial Williamsburg 2 years ago. The wool is collected, processed, and spun using all colonial-era methods and no electricity. It actually comes from the Blue Faced Leicester sheep raised on the property, who are themselves descendants of Thomas Jefferson's flock.

This capelet faced a lot of challenges. The pattern, which is the Spider Web Capelet from Stitch & Bitch Nation, contains what I believe to be an error, but we have discussed this at length at my own S&B and it seems many consider it to be more of a difference in the understanding of terms rather than an actual error.

The pattern contains a directive to yarn over a number of times. To me, "yarn over" is a type of increase that leaves an extra stitch on your needle. However, in the pattern, sometimes the yarn over means only to move the yarn from the back to the front in preparation to change from knit to purl.

This was discovered when a number of us found that our pattern mysteriously gained somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 stitches after performing a particular row, because our interpretation of the instructions was that we should yarn over, or add a stitch!

After about 10 tries between us, one of the members of my group, Tiev, figured it out, and so we were both able to make the capelet, when we thought we would simply have to abandon the pattern.

The pompoms also posed their own challenges; my first couple turned out looking like a bundle of sticks rather than a fluffy pompom. My mom devised a method of fluffing, combing, and drying in the dryer to fluff them up, and so they are now perfectly fluffy thanks to her!