Exploring Hairpin Possibilities

I'm doing what I usually do with new techniques: working on a project that lets me play with possibilities.

The idea is to create a triangular shawl made of vertical strips of hairpin lace. I'm not very far along yet, though.

I have more greens than any other yarn color by far, so I'm trying to use some of them up. (It isn't my favorite color, just by chance and the fact that I ran across great green yarns.)

The general idea is to make the hairpin lace strips in various greens, varying the design of each strip, and joining them with contrast yarns that go from a lighter range to a darker range as I move across the shawl. I'm thinking of letting the yarn ends hang down for a bit of chaos. Here are the contrast yarns threaded onto a circular needle to keep the sequence straight.

I'm getting inspiration for the variations in the strips from this magazine, with I got off of Etsy.

No, I don't read Russian, but I got over my fear of foreign craft magazines during my intense lace phase, when I lived for German patterns, with the occasional Spanish and Japanese one thrown in. One can always understand charts with a bit of decoding.

Also, I couldn't find anything about hairpin lace in English that went beyond the basics, whereas this has pages of variations I could try. (Hey, Beadwrangler, hurry up with your book!)

Here are some close-ups of the tiny bit I've finished.

I'm also varying the widths, which will be more apparent when this is finished and blocked. Here's the strip I'm working on now.

I'm doing the usual hairpin hook (simple hairpin stitch), chaining three and then hooking under the entire loop before turning. Here's a close-up.

I've found that I can't just count loops to see if strips match up because of the different yarn weights, so I just guess by stretching it out on the hairpin against the previous strip. I've had to undo some loops and make more on others, and I quickly learned to make the end (the final part where you cast off) point down (not be the top of the shawl) to make length adjustments easier.

Also like usual, I hated it at first and was tempted to unravel it, but now I'm starting to like it. So the adventure will continue.

Rust and Greens

This one was a special request from one of my sisters-in-law. I haven't heard if she likes it yet.

This was a standard bloop pattern, although I went back to my original version where I made bloops in both directions, using different colored markers for each direction. At around the middle I'd finished both patterns (e.g., all the markers were removed), so I reversed the pattern.

To begin with, I used large beige markers for the front with a repeat of 8 stitches and a pattern of 2-3-1-2. For the back, I used small pink markers with a repeat of 12 stitches and a pattern of 1-2-3-4.

Here are some closer looks.