swatches.

Last night, I spent some time organizing my craft area. I un-strung all of the beautiful crystal and glass beads I got yesterday! A co-worker and I went on a little shopping expedition over lunch yesterday to an amazing bead shop! It's confusing in that it's labelled as a candle store, but you look in the window and there are strings upon strings of beads hanging all over the place! They have lots of neat round nubby glass beads in tons of colors, animal glass beads, and hundreds of crystal ones. I was in heaven, and I managed not to spend too much money but got a load for my collection so I can make tons more stitch markers and some bracelets.

After I organized, I decided it was time to do a swatch for my Flower Basket Shawl for the Knitting Olympics. I did my 4 inch square and then measured it. WAY too small. It is supposed to be 20 stitches to 4", and I had maybe 3". So I went up a size and started to re-do my swatch. I noticed pretty quickly that it was again too small. So the pattern calls for size 5 needles with lace weight yarn. I think I'm going to use at least size 7, or maybe up to size 8! This is crazy! Has anyone else had this problem??