It's growing on me. I like it more now that there is more of it done. I'm still not 100% pleased, but I'm no longer at the edge of the rip back and start all over mindset.



I think I made the right call by not continuing with the birds eye pattern uninterrupted for the entire piece. I've switched over to plain garter stitch for the center, ornamented with a coordinating band of eyelets marching up the spine.

For the record, I've made a slight change in the Birds Eye pattern that I think looks just a tad better. On the chart provided, on rows 3, 7, 11, 15, 19 (etc.) I work the ssk that forms the right hand corner of the big eyelet as a K2tog. This gives a slightly better definition to that corner of each ring.

I tried to abstract out just one column of eyelets from the main design for my spine, but I didn't like the look. Because the original does that half-drop translation thing (staggered like brick walls are stacked), the eyelets ended up being spaced too far apart. Instead I used a similar design lifted from one of the edging patterns in Miller's book. It's from "Ring Shawl Lace Edging with Spider Insertion." I'm using just the Spider insertion strip. It complements the all-over Birds Eye pattern in that it's also ring based, but it's slightly different. Spider is one row shorter than the Birds Eye, and the eyelets stack directly one on top of each other. In BE, the slightly embossed eyelet rings all appear on the same side of the piece. In Spider, they alternate front and back. It's still good looking and being airy, matches nicely, but the ring units ARE different.

Now I'm looking at my shawl and I'm beginning to think that with this growing plain garter stitch area something interesting floating in it might be quite effective. Or maybe not (that variegated yarn color problem again.) Hmmm.....