The Tilsons

The legend of my mother’s turkey soup pervaded conversation in our house every time we had turkey.  A jeering comment from my dad - “I even tried Ketchup - nothing could make that soup edible.”  He said it in a loving way, like he really was trying to do anything to make his new wifes soup edible. After years of this, my brother or I would even chime in “You aren’t going to make Turkey soup are you?”

The story was that in the first years of their marriage, my mom found a turkey soup recipe, but neglected to follow the recipe entirely.  She made the whole thing, including simmering the carcass, adding all the vegetables and spices in two hours.  Apparently she also forgot to taste it.  She and my dad sat down to eat and nothing could bring it to life - not even ketchup.  Needless to say, she never, ever tried again.

For some reason, I have always felt the same fear of making turkey soup, it was like a curse.  I suppose it came down to the fact my mother couldn’t make it taste good, and I felt that if she couldn’t, then I wouldn’t be able to either!

Turkey is an interesting broth.  It is much lighter than chicken, but has its own special flavour.  There is a certain savoryness about it, less fatty than chicken I think.  This does make it harder to make a good tasting soup, I have found.  One year, during the first months of my engagement to Justin, my mom and I decided to through the carcass in some water for later soup making projects.  Then, a couple of months later, Justin was sick and all I had was the turkey broth to make him a soup.  (Can you hear the foreboding music?)  Read the complete Post.

I finished a fairly simple lace piece out of some handspun a couple of weeks ago and immediately became enamoured with the idea of knitting a real lace shawl with real lace weight. I wanted to make something that gave me the feeling that Athena would have had wrapped in her spinning. So, I went to the store looking for lace weight, but didn’t find any that quite suited my purposes. I wanted some variation in colour so that my shawl would have a hand spun / hand died look to it. Then, as if answering the call of my whining and complaining about not being able to find laceweight I liked consciousness, my great friend Beth gave me some Knit Picks Alpaca Alpaca Cloud for free. FREE.

It is one of the weest skeins I have ever seen (473 yrds) but was enough to make a shoulderette. Good idea, start small… make the mistakes when I’m young and then fly from the nest with a completed shawl under my belt. This led me searching on Ravelry, and then to Knitty to find - Laminaria by Elizabeth Freeman. Totally tantalizing pattern.

Now. The thing about knitting patterns that I always forget, is that they are written by a person who is different than me, thus allowing me to interpret their creation. This last part sometimes creates less than desirable effects. Given that this was my first real shawl, my first real lace weight and my first ever chart reading, the fact that I spent over 1.5 hours on the first three rows was okay with me. But you might learn from my experiences. (Being that after completing two and a half charts I realized that I was making mistakes and had to rip it all back to restart) It always takes that rip back for me to learn how to read the pattern from the knitting.

Here are my beginners hints:

1. Here is a great crochet cast-on (provisional cast-on) video.
2. The two beginning stitches that you created with the cast-on will be knit over and over again to make the actual cast on row which is in the centre of the top of the shawl (hence the markers).
3. Basically, for the whole shawl you are making progressively larger “c” shapes around these first stitches, with a very defined centre line (hence the markers)
4. All ws (wrong side) rows are pearled (yes, this means the one after “Next Row (ws)”
5. Set Up Chart: this is where it is good to figure out what a 1-3 and a 3-3 look like so that if you forget where you are at, you can read your knitting.
6. K1 tbl yo k1 tbl: You knit into the back of the loop, without dropping the stitch of the left needle, yarn over and then knit into the back of the loop again, then drop the stitch of the left needle.
7. There is always a k stitch in between the “1-3″’s etc (this is even true if you repeat a couple of patterns during the first half of a row - ie before the markers) The marked stitch in the middle counts as the “k” stitch.
8. You will be repeating rows of the chart over and over again along the row of the knitting until you reach the end. You will knit the stitches in between the red lines over and over again to the end of the knitted row. (update) I cannot tell you how important it is to remember to put that k st. in between the repeats (and for that matter remember to repeat the whole pattern - I was occasionally confused and thus skipping the first 1-3 of the pattern once I got started for some reason, this led me to rip everything back)
9. The chart rows always finish before the marked centre of the shawl. The chart row 3-3 star never spans the marked centre of the shawl.
10. Since there are no stitch counts for every row, you have to make sure that you end your knitting with the end of your chart row (plus those two k st.) I was just k2ing when I had some extras. EEP.

The pattern has a definite look to it (to see it up close check out Emmaclitur’s flickr photo) Laceweight will be a little different, but you get the idea. Now back to knitting!

I finally gave our website a much needed overhaul. Wedding and honeymoon photos are HERE! I added the Flickr Photo Album widget which displays a sample of recent photos from our Flickr account in the side bar and generates the gallery under the “photos” link in the top menu. The pages are a little slow to load at first as there are quite of few pictures in each gallery. Leave some comments if you wish.