Well, here it is.  Nine months in the making - my Forest Path stole is finally finished.  (Pattern from Summer 2003 Interweave Knits).  Biggest Lesson Learned:  There's a reason why most people knit lace in white or light colors.  I encourage anyone wanting to do this (or any piece) in black to have their head and eyes examined.  Not necessarily in that order.

We start with a clean sheet on the carpet, a sodden mass, eight three-foot long lengths of 1/16th inch brass tubing, and assorted straight pins:

Threading the tubing through the edge stitches was a bit tedious.  It would have gone faster had the tubing nice knitting needle style points.  The ends though didn't snag very much, they were quite smooth.  The only difficulty was that the adhesive used to attach the price labels in the hardware store was difficult to get off.  Rubbing alcohol didn't do it.  I needed to resort to nail polish remover.

I have to admit, I'm pretty pleased with this one.  I like the Suri Alpaca.  For the record, I used two full skeins, and managed to eke out 21 tiers of motifs.  I had only a tiny bit left over.  My stole ended up being 29" x 75" (73.6cm x 190.5cm).  Now with the Spider Queen and the Forest Path under my belt - both gifts for others - I'm looking around for killer lace shawl or stole to make for myself.   What to do next?  Possibly Hazel Carter's Alcazar (no affiliation, just gloming pix), or one of the many spectacular Niebling designs worked at shawl-let rather than doily scale  (pix of many can be found off of Yarn Over, Nurhanne's knitted lace website.)  But there remains one problem: I am not  the lace-wearing type...