Here you go, something that isn’t food or school related. I’m definitely still knitting.

I started this shawl back in October and finished knitting it a couple weeks ago and blocked it on Wednesday, when it was a beautiful 65° outside. To refresh your memory, this is Granny Cheney’s Shetland Shawl from the book Wrapped in Lace by Margaret Stove. I knit it out of KnitPicks Bare merino lace weight and used two full skeins and size US2/2.75mm needles. I had planned on going up a needle size, I thought it would look better with a looser gauge, but I’m glad I didn’t. The shawl is delicate enough as it is and I would have run out of yarn a lot sooner. I’m pretty happy with how it looks.

You can kind of see here and in the photo below where I ran out of yarn and had to grab some Jaggerspun Zephyr in white to finish up. It’s just in the areas between the center and the big border, where the double rows of holes are. It’s not a glaring difference, you can see it in person but it really doesn’t look too bad. I just hated to order and extra ball of yarn for that little bit of knitting.

This was a lot of knitting. A lot, a lot. First, you cast on about 20 stitches and knit this super long edging, it was about ten feet, I think. Then you pick up some stitches, knit one side of the border, knit the center, then you pick up the rest of the stitches around the edging and knit the other borders (or you can do each border one at a time and sew them together, you’d pick up less stitches at once but have more seaming) and then graft the tops of the borders around the edge of the center and sew up the seam from the beginning and end of the border and the beginning and end of the edging. If it sounds fussy, it was. It wasn’t nearly as confusing as it seems.

This was actually one of the most well-written patterns I think I’ve ever followed. It’s about ten pages, mostly charts, the written directions were short and assumed you knew what you were doing most of the time, but everything was very clear and easy to understand. The only mistakes I ran across ended up being my own fault, from losing my place in one of the charts (which are huge) and trying to just skim the directions (stupid!).

So, what’s next? Well, I do have something on the needles, Freewheelin’ by Lee Meredith, and it is almost done, I think. I think the next lacy thing I want to make is the Crown Prince Square Shawl by Nancy Bush, I’d still like to have a black cardigan of some kind, and the sock bug is nibbling, so I may need to make a pair of socks. Now I just need some money.