The Moonlight Sonata Shawl that I so blithely cast on at the Oxford Bluestockings KAL last weekend is proving itself to be my knitting nemesis.

The problem could be that I have selected a yarn that, while utterly gorgeous, loves nothing more than to obscure stitches and cling to itself in inscrutable clumps of yarny defiance. Much tinking – I think more tinking than knitting – has taken place since I got beyond the 83 rows that begin the collar of the shawl.

I was having such a lovely time with the little socks and sandwiches of recent times; I wonder why I felt the need to try and expand my knitting capabilities into that trickiest and harshest realm of knitting disciplines: The Knitting of the Lace.

I am tangled up in blues.

I’m assured all will be easier if I can master the ability to read charts. Fat chance, says I. Going through a pattern line by line somehow makes more sense to me than a chart… the way lace charts work back and forth tangles up my head so it feels as twisted as my Yarn Overs. Which is where the real trouble lies.

I never really learned how to do YOs properly, so I wind the wool around the needle and it makes a twist in the stitch which then pulls the next row out of shape and so on until my lace is a snarled mass of twisted wool. Observe the assymmetrical lace tangledom around the central divide on the shawl pattern;

Maybe nobody else will notice my YO indiscrections, but I will know and I will be upset by them. Which is why I have frogged back to the collar-band and vowed to learn how to do YOs and follow lace charts! In the meantime, I am planning some less ambitious knitting projects to restore my dented mojo.