Presenting The Black Widow Spider King

You've all been so patient, waiting for me to finish this monster. When I finally discarded the convoluted, inaccurate grafting instructions I found on the Web and substituted a simple "follow the leader" process, the final step took ten minutes. I won't clutter this post with my moronic instructions, but I'll do a really short post in a day or two to show you what I did.

For those who tuned in late, the project started off as Hazel Carter's Spider Queen. Well, the first thing I fiddled with was the color, changing the boring white to dramatic black. Then I had some difficulty with the chart for the central square, so I fooled with that too, ending up with something sort of similar. I motored right along to the the inner border, which I didn't care for, so I discarded it and designed one featuring bouncing baby spiders. At this point, I kind of decided that the original pattern pamphlet was probably not guiding me anywhere, so I mutated a Japanese pattern named Mondnacht into the outer border. And of course, I had, by this point, no recollection of the original edging at all, so I dinked about in Excel and created something pleasing that also fit nicely into discrete repeats.

I have no idea what the copyright issues might be and the pattern notes are such a mess I don't think I could begin to convey the directions. If anyone is truly desperate for this pattern and is able to improvise a bit, I'll be happy to send along all the notes and charts. Everything is in electronic format in Photoshop, CorelDraw, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Acrobat.

The shawl used about 3000 yards of Yarn Place's Gentle and was knit on #2 needles.

It's quite large (about 6.75 feet x 5.5 feet, and 9 feet on the diagonal), so it was difficult to photograph the entire thing. When I have the energy to unpin it, I'll take one of those artsy, swirly pictures that show lacy shawls at their finest. For now, let's take a flatland tour.

I couldn't stand far enough away to get the entire thing in the picture frame.



But you get the idea.

Here is a closer shot of the central square:


And a bit of the edging:



Attempts to take meaningful detail photos were a bit of a problem.



But I finally got Harry to move over long enough to take this pix:


Of course, everyone decided to party right on top of the darned thing. Daphne, who is now living in Japan, sent a bottle of sake.



As you can see, the sake was rather potent...


A good time was had by all, although it took me twenty minutes to untangle the octopi from the now-empty sake bottle.

The entire set of photos can be found on Flickr, and I will soon upload a few to Ravelry, as well.

Please enjoy the views!