I cast on for another lace shawl last week and it was a nightmare. The chart was great, but the yarn and needles weren't working and I couldn't understand why things were going so completely wrong. I was using lace weight and size 3's and everything was impossibly loose, even though the pattern actually called for size 8 needles. I knit Frozen Lake with lace weight on 6s and (not counting my inability to increase lace in pattern) it worked .... It wasn't making sense and I really want to try that pattern, so I decided to cast on again with Palette but if I gave up on lace weight, what would happen to my Bayou Shimmer and the rest of my lace weight stash?

That's the kind of thing that makes me lie awake at night and worry.

By the light of day, I figured it out. The yarn I was fighting with had 1300 yards in a 100 gram skein, which makes it a lot finer than anything else I've ever tackled. I hate it. And guess what -- it's LYS yarn. Because if I'm going to hate a yarn this much, it's going to be something I bought at a "real" yarn store and spent more than usual on.

So I'm going to bury that yarn in the darkest recesses of my stash and pull out one of my single skeins of Gloss lace weight and see if I can't make it work. Turns out that the pattern I'd planned to use doesn't have charts and I'm not in the mood for miles of written instructions, so I searched Ravelry and found some possibilities.

I'm pretty sure I want these --

Anya
Laminaria
Shetland Shimmer Scarf
Bear Claw Scarfette

And I also like these --

Enchanting
A Scarf for Ally
Traveling Roses Lace Scarf
Lucy's Diamonds