In a previous post I mentioned that I'm not very fond of bobbles. Well, seeing
this shawl by Rod on Flickr reminded me of my natural white Viva and the fact that I've only knitted a swatch or two testing a couple of patterns in Nancy Bush's book
Knitted Lace of Estonia.
This is half a star, the Crown Prince pattern. I like it very much that the bobbles are fairly flat; the combination of them and the lace holes of roughly the same size is very appealing too, in my opinion.
Here's a photo of the shawl, made by Knitting Soo on Flickr. It's very pretty, but I can't help thinking about possible modifications... A frame consisting of rows of holes instead of garter stitch, for example.
Getting the tension right for the bobbles was a bit tricky, but didn't take very long after all. I've had more trouble with the tension in the stocking-stitch areas: for example, getting the loops for a bobble (a "nupp" in Estonian) loose enough tends to rub off on the surrounding stitches - and purling all the loops making a single stitch tends to make me purl the surrounding stitches too tight.
I enjoy knitting this kind of pattern a lot, primarily because it's something I haven't done before. (A tiny swatch about a year ago hardly counts.) Also, dear old wool-silk blend Viva is a delight to work with, and the sheen of it makes the bobbles almost look like pearls in daylight. Not captured in this photo due to severe lack of daylight.
