I take it back!

I must have just been having a few off-days in a row with the red doily, because my mojo is back with a vengeance.

So before I start talking about what changed, I'm going to announce it officially.

Pattern: Lyra by Herbert Niebling.   According to a google search done just now, he's the 4th most popular Herbert- which I thought was interesting.
Yarn: Shadow lace by Knit Picks.  I do feel slightly ashamed at having Knit Picks in my stash, but I love this color, and I got it when I was buying dye forever ago and if I added $8 then I could get free shipping.   Anyhow, I love the color.
Current Progress:  Row 120/180.

If you guessed it and I for some reason didn't see it- let me know.  If you suspected this pattern and didn't guess, you should have- I had some really cute stitch markers that could have been yours!

And a little picture before I break it down here...

I'm not a huge fan of cables.  I love the way they look, and every once in a while I enjoyed a cabled hat or other small project to remind myself that I can, in fact, still cable and I do, in fact, still dislike doing it.  I just never got past the point where cabling wasn't so darn awkward and required full concentration, the use of funny faces with my tongue sticking out and the odd grunt or swear word, depending on the scenario.  And so when I got to the point in my lace uberdoily/tablecloth where it said to place the next 2 stitches behind the 3rd and 4th stitches, knit it took me a minute before I realized what it wanted me to do.

What?  There's no cables in lace tablecloths!  I looked on Ravelry at everyone else's Lyra.  Sure enough- cables.  So I contemplated what the flower would look like if I just did plain knitting in place of the cables.  I didn't like it.  I had a cup of tea and counted cables.  I couldn't knit a Niebling only to cut out the cable part- it's like dropping out of a marathon after 26 miles because that extra .2 is far too much effort.  I had another cup of tea and dusted off my cable needle.

The first row made me cry a little.  I had to sit in silence while working each of the 56 little buggers.  The next row was a plain old knit row, and it was blissful despite being absolutely huge. The next row wanted me to shift the cables while knitting 2 stitches in between them- a sigh of relief, not quite so many cables. Except I couldn't get my stitch count to work. I thought that maybe I'd just messed up the first one and kind of fudged it in to place.  Same with the second, third, fourth and somewhere around the 6th repeat of this, I decided to skip that row of cables and go back to cabling in the same place every four rows, thus cutting out half of the cables and saving me about a month and a lot of tears in this project.

And after much deliberation, I like my way better.  Sorry Herbert.  And now I'm loving my project again.

Oh, here's some handspun I'm plying.  I wonder if there's going to be enough for socks...