So I finished this lace shawl, and it’s so gorgeous I can’t believe I knit it.

It’s the first thing I’ve done entirely from charts, and I have to say I’m pretty pleased with m’bad self. The pattern is Mystic Fire by Anna Dalvi, and the yarn is Northbound knitting Superwash Merino in the gorgeous colour way ‘Artemisia’.

The pattern is great – some of the charts look intimidating at first but one row at a time I managed just fine. I have an iPad, and an app called ‘Good Reader‘ that opens and lets me mark up pdf files. I can’t recommend it enough – it let me outline the row I was on for easy reading, insert other lines to break up the chart into digestible chunks and leave notes for myself on the side, such as which repeat I was on, and directions another knitter used to make it bigger if I felt so inclined.

Still, when it was all done, there was a problem. I may have needed a few extra rows of garter stitch in there, but the thing curls up faster then my cat in the sunny spot on the couch. I didn’t discover this until after it was bound off and blocked.

I needed a solution, because the curl really bothered me, and damned if I wasn’t going to get to enjoy the best bit of lace knitting I’d ever done. I bat around different ideas like sewing on edging, blocking it even more aggressively, threatening it, and finally hit on a solution that I’m sure many knitters before me have discovered but was brand new and shiny to me and had a good amount of it’s-so-simple-it-just-might-work going for it. I was going to crochet on a simple trim.

Here’s how I did it:

• I used the leftover yarn from the project, luckily there was some. You only need a small amount.
• I used a smaller hook size then the needles I’d used. 1.25mm smaller to be exact.

• I tied the working yarn to the bottom corner of the shawl and single-crocheted my way across, using the small holes left by the stretchy k2tog bind off (highlighted in yellow). At the corner I did 3 SC in the same stitch to turn.

Even after only 1 row of SC you can see it’s looking better:

I did 2 rows of SC before tying off the yarn and blocking it again.

It worked like a charm. I know some folks might not be fond of having a thick border below their lace, but in this case I feel it works. It’s certainly way better than the curled edge I was getting before, even after removing the pins and wearing it the edge stays flat, allowing me to take this creepy instagram pic:

Best of all, it cost me nothing extra and I was able to work directly into a cast off piece. The beauty of crochet was that if it didn’t work I could have just pulled it out without damage to the shawl. I’m pretty happy with the results :)

Ravelry Project Page here.