I’ve been thinking long and hard about the project I started last November for my grandmother. It’s a Cozy, which I intended to be some kind of shawl, wrap, lap blanket, bit of warmth combo item that she’d get a lot of use out of.

The trouble is, it is immensely slow-going. Literally it takes me hours to do one 8-row repeat, and it’s not going to end up terribly large for the amount of yarn it would take (eleven 50-gram balls).

It’s lovely, but I know I’ve made mistakes in the lace, and I know that I will never finish it with how slowly I’m going.

Therefore, and as much as it pains me, I decided to start a new shawl with this yarn:

the Sun Ray Shawl.

It has a lovely lace pattern, it doesn’t look too terribly difficult, it’s a larger size, and the examples I’ve seen on Ravelry look perfect for my grandmother.

In my first attempt I breezed through the first 17 rows, but suddenly I found myself with quite a few extra stitches. I started wondering if the written pattern was different from the chart, but in my infinite wisdom (and extreme laziness) I decided I’d rather re-knit the first 17 rows than spend the time figuring out what I’d done wrong.

This meant fiddling with the crochet cast-on again, for which I found Crafty Daisies’Learn to Crochet videos immensely helpful.

I feel a lot better about this project than I ever did about the Cozy. The yarn looks spectacular in the pattern, and I know this will become a really beautiful piece, with much less frustration and agony on my end.

And of course this time I put in a life line, just in case.