Pooling for the Ravelympics

(Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool.)

Leaves and Vines Pooling Stole
Yarn: Wollmeise Lace, approximately 1/2 skein or 870 yards
Needles: US 4 for the purl rows and US 5 for the knit rows
Size: 6 feet long when it’s lightly blocked – will probably stretch to 6.5 feet after some wearing. Is also a couple of inches wider than its fingering-weight cousin – approx 19” wide, lightly blocked.


Pattern
Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 100 stitches onto a US5 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen. (Some people also cast on a couple of extra stitches for the garter rows, and then do a k2together to lose them when they get into the pattern rows. It all depends on your individual stitch tension.)

Knit garter stitch for 6-12 rows. (I knew that I would have 9 stitches on either end of my lace pattern, 18 total, so I did 12 rows of garter stitch to make it a thicker edging all around.)

Start working with the chart below. Here it is as a PDF as well, so that you can print it at a much higher resolution.


(Click on the chart to get it in a larger, more printable size.)

End with a row 20.

Knit garter stitch for 6-12 rows, to match the beginning garter stitch rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.




March 19, 2012: Edited to add errata, courtesy of Mary Lou (MLO on Ravelry)

That reminds me, I have a couple of minor corrections that I wanted to tell you about that I noticed in the pattern:

• Your instructions say to cast on 100 stitches, but you need an odd number to have the same number of stitches on each border since the pattern stitches total 81.
• On line 14 of the chart, it’s marked as 5 stitches in box 36, but it actually should say 4.
• The instructions for the ^ say “slip one, knit the next two stitches” which I read as “knit the next two stitches together”