Now that all the Giftmas knitting has been gifted, I can actually get my brag on about some of these babies. Some have already been displayed, but here's the first of the secret projects.

Pattern: Veil of Isis from BadCatDesigns
Yarn: Indecita Baby Alpaca, fingering weight, purchased in Cuzco by Ironman way back when, a bit more then four skeins, but I don't know the yardage
Needles: US 2/2.75 mm
Gauge: it's lace. Who cares.
Start/finish: This was my Ravelympics 2008 project, so I started August 8, 2008. Finished November 5, 2009.
Comments/mods: The Albatross is finished, long live the Albatross. I decided that doing my first beaded anything would be a good challenge for the 2008 Ravelympics, and doing an entire lace shawl in two plus weeks would be a serious challenge. I was right. The beads slowed me way down, but I still don't think I could have gotten the whole thing done without the beads. Lace is hard, and when the rows got up in the neighborhood of 400+ stitches each, things slowed down even more...

The pattern is not for the faint of heart, as it requires being able to read your knitting and figure out where you are both within the row and within the pattern. The pattern is charted, but not for the entire shawl, so it takes some paying attention to keep things going. That being said, the pattern is fairly intuitive once you get into the swing of it. And the results are beyond gorgeous.

The pattern calls for five repeats of chart B, but I did four. I used size 6 black seed beads that I found at the local Houston bead shop. Hundreds of them. And a very small crochet hook. I got one tube of beads to start, which had ~600 beads in it - those were used up about two thirds of the way through. Suffice to say I lost count and there are a metric crapton of shiny little black bits.

Unblocked the shawl was 38 inches along the diagonal and 28 inches along each side. I messed up a bit with the blocking wires, and ended up blocking it in a slightly circular shape, but it ended up about 50 inches in diameter.

This baby went to my sister-in-law, who is possibly the only person I know elegant enough to be able to use this. She seems to be enjoying it so far.

Porpoise Fur