Sampler Stole KAL

Here's my progress as of last night:

This is actually my first time working lace on a garter stitch ground. It's awfully ugly until it's stretched out, isn't it? I'm working mine on 2.00mms (the same ones I used for my Frost Flowers), so it's terribly scrunchy and crumply on the needle.

I've changed my mind about those decreases - I think they should be worked as a k2tog on both even and odd-numbered rows. Here are closeups of the fan and bead motifs, worked with k2togs on both sides:

They look fine done this way, which is all the proof I need, but I've also thought a little bit about why this should be. I'd wondered, just looking at the chart, why the motifs don't use mirrored decreases within single rows - the motifs have a vertical line of symmetry, and you'd think that a k2tog on the right-hand side would be mirrored with a ssk on the left-hand side. Instead, all the decreases are k2togs, or right-leaning decreases. Working them as k2togs on the wrong side as well means that decreases in any given row will slant in opposition to the ones in the row below it, in effect canceling out any "shape" or "lean" and creating an almost-neutral decrease. It might make sense to reverse the wrong-side shaping in a motif with mirrored decreasing, but here, it would actually be counterproductive.

Does that make sense? Am I just thinking wayyyyyy to deep into this? It's my understanding that this fan pattern is a very old Shetland lace motif - anyone with a reference book with this pattern might be able to look it up and see how it's usually worked, but I think this might be the answer. Then, too, rows 6 and 28 specifically call for k2togs on the wrong side, so that supports the theory as well.

**by the way, is anyone here on dial-up and frustrated by my big pictures? email me if that's so, and i'll start using smaller files.