Dreambird (designed by Nadita Swings) is a stunning shawl of multi-colored feathers on a billow of mohair (Dreambird) What's not to love?!  So, I bought the pattern through Ravelry and ordered a dramatic colorway of Noro Silk Garden Sock (with long segments of hue so the individual feathers will come out in different colors instead of variegated variations of each other) and a smokey purpley shade of gray Kidsilk Haze for the background — and waited for a good excuse to delve into a project that would take some brain (because it is all done with the magic of short rows!).

Our trip to Reno was the opportunity I wanted.  So, the night before we left, I gathered all the parts together — including the number of light & dark locking markers the instructions called for — and cast on 130 stitches (using crochet cast-on as directed) with the Noro yarn and knit through the first 2 rows — executing my first German Short Row — and then read that it was time to start the "feather yarn" which, of course, was the Noro yarn.  Which I was already using.  

Because in my mind, "main yarn" meant the visually dominant yarn — the Noro — while the designer meant the backround yarn — the Kidsilk Haze.  So, when the directions said to cast on with "your main color" I went straight to the Noro.  Upon closer examination of the opening notes, I found a sentence beginning "If you don't like Kid Mohair as main yarn…." — this was how you were supposed to know that the Kid Mohair was the main yarn.  Accurate, but cryptic.

And that was pretty much how the whole first feather went for me.*  This is the kind of pattern that requires the knitter to follow the designer's thought process.  There are 21 pages of directions — including some diagrams, a row-by-row account of how many stitches are worked, and instructions for a smaller version for children, all of which I used to help me understand the step-by-step directions which continued to be accurate, but cryptic.  

For example, the statement "knit up to 5 stitches before the double stitch of the previous row, include the double stitch in the counting!" threw me for a loop.  Until I just accepted that it meant 4 stitches and the double stitch.  There were times when things were said in such detail that I got confused.  There were times when what seemed to me to be a critical piece of information was just assumed.  Everything was technically accurate — just cryptic.  To me.  Perhaps other knitters have gotten inside the designer's head more easily and have been able to work it more intuitively.  But I had to approach nearly every step like an Hercule Poirot at a murder scene.

For me, there has been a lot of counting and re-counting, a lot of "oh, THAT'S what she means!" and more pulling out and re-knitting than I would have liked. ** But it has also been a superb puzzle!  And the more I struggled with it, the more determined I was to figure it out.  Triumph eventually followed every frustration (and how sweet it was each time the numbers were right!) — and, finally, I had completed the first feather.  And it was really quite lovely.

Having worked out the directions for the first feather — and having written myself some supplementary notes and adjusted the use of the lock-in markers so that it is more obvious to me where to do what — I have pretty much danced through the second feather.  This project is one that I need to work on almost daily, I think, to keep the "dance steps" fresh in my mind.  Feather by feather, it will probably become as intuitive — perhaps even as dream-like — a process as the designer intended.  

*Note: the pattern was originally written in German, but has been translated into several languages now — the English version has been technically revised through Ravelry and is nearly flawless.

**I may have used the term "demon knitting" to refer to this project more than once.