Alcazar continues. As mentioned before, progress will be slower now that rounds are more than 500 stitches. As you can see though, I'm averaging four or so per evening:



This blurry photo was taken by stuffing my bag-like Alcazar over the corner of one of my sofa pillows. The area below the horizontal line of meshes is the side edge of the center square. The area above is the new part added on around that square's perimeter. You can see what I meant by picking up in the side meshes - each one of those big openings had one stitch picked up in it, with YOs in between pick-ups.

No problems with Chart 2 so far, and the pattern (once established) contains enough internal clues so that it's easy to proof as I go along. For example, there are central double decreases that always line up in a particular stitch column. If one is off alignment it's pretty clear that something odd happened between the current spot and the last one. As a result I haven't deployed my usual swarm of stitch markers to mark the repeats.

My opinion so far on difficulty is that I probably wouldn't recommend Alcazar as a first lace project to someone who has never knit from a chart before. BUT I think that anyone who CAN follow a chart and who has the patience to do so for 500 stitch rounds should have no problems at all - whether or not they've ever attempted a lace project before.