A Finished Project

I remembered last night where the pictures of my latest project were. Instead of being in the generic knitting folder, I had rightly put them in the Singer folder as it was done on the Singer 327 machine! (But that doesn't explain where the pictures of Lucy in the dress I made are).
This is called "Victorian Shawl". One member of the Georgetown group studied machine knitting at college and gave me a few older magazines (1999/2000, LOL). This was the only pattern in the four magazines labelled Beginner (as different from "Advanced Beginner"). I tried it first back in April when I was still farily new to that machine. I knew how to work the machine, but the pattern was so badly written that I just could not figure it out! I was so fustrated!
But I decided to try again in late summer and just 'fake it till you make it' LOL.

The big issue is that the pattern uses the word 'row' to mean two different things. You make this shawl by having 2 sets of 2 needles in work, separated by 2 needles not in work. Then, you work 8 mini rows on these 4 needles. Then, skip 2, and pull the next two to work, move the carriage to the right, and put the furthest most 2 that you had just been working on, in hold. Now, you have 2 groups of 2, and do eight rows. You keep doing this, going across the needlebed....that is ALSO called a row! DOH!

You can see how one 'row' slants to the left, then the next row is slanted to the right. You can also see how there is two little columns separated by 'floats', each of these blocks joined to the next. You can vary how many needles in work you have, how many inbetween that are out of work, how many times you go back and forth between the two groups (which makes the rectangle higher or squatter). You can do increases, or keep the piece all one width. Very versatile, it can be done on any gauge machine too.

This was the yarn I used. It's a cone I got at the Spinrite sale in August, for $10. It's too large to weigh on my little scale (it's on an Interweave Knits for comparison). It doesn't look like any has been used now! It's not exactly soft, and it's very white, so I don't know what else I'll use it for. There are little slubby's that got to be very annoying too.

That picture of the cone is taken Sept. 2, after I frogged the following:
I realized that the angle of the increases was way off, and the shawl would be 6ft before I got the depth I needed for the middle back! Indeed, I was supposed to increase two groups of two everytime I got to the end of a right moving row, and I had only increased one group. So I ripped it out and started right back. It went pretty quickly until I got to the full width part. Then it dragged on, and I had other projects to work on....blah blah blah. I finally finished it the weekend before our cruise I think, at which point I immediately cast on for another cruise item and ran into lots of other issues with the simple pattern....but that's another day!