To bead or not to bead...

...that is the question. Well, it was. It didn't take very long to answer it.

I finished netting the shawl on Wednesday night (and, yes, the script is edited! Go me! I expect it'll still need editing again, but at least everyone's happy for now), and then I had to think about what to do for the edging.

It's not a huge shawl. A metre or so square is fairly modest, and I think if I do another one I'll make it a bit bigger. That means I have room to go to town on the edging if I feel like it, and so my first thought was "let's give it a nice long fringe". And then, almost immediately after that, I thought "actually, let's not, because that stuff tangles". It would probably be all right during wear, but the moment I washed it...

At this point I had a disturbing flashback, so I'm now going to have to explain to you what that was. When I was at university, initially there was this wonderful train that ran between Glasgow and Harwich, and it stopped at both Oxenholme (the nearest station to my parents' house) and Sheffield (where I was at university). So I could just get on this train and relax, because there'd be no changes. Unfortunately they axed it around the end of my first year, which meant that now I had to change at Manchester Piccadilly, which was not, at that point, the very nice station it is now. And one day I was returning to Sheffield after a trip up to the Lake District, and I boarded a train at Manchester which purported to be going to Sheffield. As one would, in the circumstances.

After a while I noticed that the scenery was looking unfamiliar (not to mention decidedly grotty). Still, I didn't worry too much. I was pretty used to trains being diverted. I did, however, start to get concerned when it pulled in at Wakefield, which was definitely not on the usual route, so I decided to speak to the guard when he next came past. In fact, the carriage I was in was pretty quiet; I was sitting just across the aisle from a pair of nuns, and there were very few other people in the carriage.

Until this bloke got on at Wakefield and made a beeline for the saintly sisters. It turned out he had this thing about nuns. I don't mean in a bad way, though it was still pretty embarrassing for them; no, he held them in the highest possible esteem and wanted to make that very clear to them. Which he did, at length, and in quite a loud voice. And before he got off, which was at the next stop (I forget where that was, but it was still highly unexpected), he said he wanted to give them something as a token of his enormous admiration. And what he gave them was this... ummm... drape.

I don't really know what it was meant to be. It was quite a slippery nylon jersey, with wide stripes in what I seem to recall were autumnal colours; it was maybe about 80 cm by a metre; and there were long fringes on the short sides. So the nuns thanked him very kindly, watched him get off the train, and then looked at this thing. And then at each other. And then at me.

"Would you like this?" they asked. "It was very kind of him but we really don't know what to do with it."

Neither did I, really; but I was a very impecunious student and I was sure I'd find a use for it. The train eventually stopped at Doncaster, by which time I realised it couldn't possibly be going to Sheffield (I never did find out what happened there), so I took my leave of the nuns and hopped off the train, weird nylon drapey thing and all. I caught another train from there to Sheffield, where I used the drapey thing as a small tablecloth to disguise the fact that I was using a large cardboard box as a bedside table. And then, in the fullness of time, I washed it... carefully, by hand, but all to no avail. The colours all ran, and the fringes tangled beyond redemption. That was disappointing enough on something I got for nothing, but I'm not having it happen again on a shawl that took several days' work to net.

So I thought... crochet. That won't tangle. And then I thought, well, what about adding some beads? I had, after all, some suitable beads that fell into the familiar, and entirely too large, category of "things I bought for a specific project and then I changed my mind later". I realised that I could probably do two clusters of treble crochet into each square of netting and then separate the clusters using a bead (and possibly an extra chain stitch or two, depending on exactly how it turned out). I worked that out, and realised that I'd need about 750 beads, allowing for possibly a few extra at the corners. Did I have as many as 750? I was pretty sure I did, but there was only one way to find out.

In fact, beading around the edge of a shawl like this is a good idea, and not just for decorative reasons. A net shawl made from fingering-weight yarn is very light and floaty, so if you add a little bit of weight around the edges it just hangs a bit better. Even so, threading 750 beads onto a cone of yarn is something of an undertaking. There are, as I think I've mentioned before, two ways of doing it. If you don't have a suitable large-eye beading needle (and you do have the patience of Job), you can do the thing where you pull the yarn through the beads using a loop of finer thread. I am deeply grateful that I do, in fact, have a suitable large-eye beading needle.

And, as it turned out, I didn't need 750 of them after all. Not having done any serious crochet for a very long time, I massively underestimated the size of a treble crochet cluster. It turns out that one per square of netting is, in fact, plenty, and if I separate each pair of clusters with three chains (the central one of which has a bead), the edging still ruffles a bit, which was the effect I was after. Yet another useful fact to store away for possible future reference. And moving all those beads along the yarn is probably slower than the actual crocheting.

So it is going to be a little while before I actually finish my shawl, especially given the fact that there's the inevitable baby hat to complete (hot pink this time, with a burgundy welt), and a couple of string bags for the food bank, and my counsellor has some questions she'd like me to think about which I need to remind her she was going to e-mail me, and the ongoing stuff with the drama group, and the choir, and the netting class, and the tension swatch for the sock yarn, and we've got a church lunch on Sunday so I need to bake, and... oh, I didn't tell you I'm being interviewed on the 14th, did I? Maybe more on that next time, but there will be a video link afterwards, so you'll get to see it if you want.

It'll happen. I may be chaotic but I do get there in the end!