I finished my little handspun shawl over the weekend and blocked it yesterday.  This was an extremely fast knit and I really, really like the way it turned out.  I’m actually pretty excited about it since this is the first shawl I’ve knit without a pattern and my first time making up a lace chart and figuring repeats and all that.  I have to admit that I was worried that something, anything, would go wrong.  I was fairly convinced that my math was off, that I’d run out of yarn, that the lace would look like crap with with the stripey yarn.  Thanks to many hours in front of the computer fiddling with charts it all worked out.  I did have to cut a few rows out of the lace since my yarn was running short but I ended up with enough in the end to do an extra row on the very last of the edging, so it all worked out in the end.

I know the lace would look much better in a solid color but I do like it with the stripes.  I’m tempted to knit this again with a solid yarn and do the smaller chevrons from the top part of the lace all over the body.

And here it is all unpinned.  The shawl is fairly small, about 45” across the top and 23” from the center of the back to the bottom point, it’s a good scarf shape.  The yarn is the very first lace weight yarn that I spun and it’s pretty rough.  It has a lot of slubs and thick spots, spots that are very thin and extremely over-twisted, it was rough to knit with.  The yarn felt kind of scratchy and harsh while I was knitting but after I washed and blocked the shawl it’s very soft and has a nice drape to it and it has that crisp look that lace gets.  Blocking changes everything.  And if I had been planning this out from the beginning instead of kind of winging it, I would have made a nice big swatch first, but I didn’t.

Today I decided to finally finish my Alpaka Tunic so I got it out and pinned it together and tried it on and it is way too long.  So I’ve unpicked the seaming I already did and frogged the yoke and next I’ll rip back a couple inches and reknit the yoke to make it a little shorter.  Going through all this sucks but it’s going to be worth it in the end since it will fit better and be a decent length.