Flared Lace Smoke Ring

A finished object in 2 days = Love. The sad irony about this project: it's really fast and easy, but I was unnerved by past lace projects, thus totally avoided knitting this one. I casted on Sunday night and finished Monday night, only 24 hours later (that's so fast for me). A highly recommended project for those who fear lace knitting.

A few things I learned which made knitting easier:

• Cast on using a larger needle as suggested by Too Much Wool. I used a 7mm needle and the Knit-On technique, shown here by Eunny Jang who calls it the Lace Cast On. Those cast on stitches are subsequently slipped onto the smaller needle before joining into a circle.
  
• Stitch markers are good. Until now I thought stitch markers were a pain, but they are in fact helpful. A solitary green marker was placed at the end of round or EOR, and purple markers were used for the rest of the round. Starting at the 7th pattern repeat, I placed larger purple markers to indicate the halfway point, very informative.
  
• I kept my place by closing the chart in a book so that the first line peeking out is the one to knit. I had wanted to make a system for reading the chart, but it was so easy to read the knitting itself, there was not much need for the chart anyway.
  

Here's the unblocked piece measuring 14" in length, 12" across the bottom flared section, 9.5" across the top. There's not enough yarn left to complete another 8-line repeat. I wish there was a little more yarn since this is shorter than the 19" length written in the pattern. However blocking did help bring the length to 18" hooray :)

Flared Lace Smoke Ring by Jackie ES

• >300 yds sock weight wool superwash
• 4.5mm Inox Express 16" circular needles
• 7mm Addi Turbo 16" circular needles for Cast On only
  
• colored stitch markers

Seventh Time's a Charm

Diva can be a bitch.

After finishing the stripey part with minimal trouble, I assumed this pattern would be entirely easy. BUT after reading the instructions for the left collar section, it seemed rather confusing, and it was so much harder than I anticipated.

I made mistakes the entire way through while reading the pattern, and after ripping the same 50 rows out 6 times, I finally made a chart:


This doesn't make any sense without the original Diva pattern in hand, but indeed it is the key to understanding how the design elements integrate simultaneously. Maybe my brain stinks, but this was tricky!

Here's what I have now, this is about the entire 50g of yarn for the left collar in size M. I am ready to attach the back shoulder stitches to the collar which completes the sleeve opening!