August 2014 - our 68 year old neighbor across the street who lives alone had a punk kick in her front door in the middle of the day and steal her jewelry, including all that she had just inherited from her mother who recently passed…nothing can replace what she’s lost but I decided to give her this so that she has a new pretty keepsake to wear (and in the end it turns out there really was a reason that I knit two sandness shawls) ~ now if only we can do something to return her sense of security to her…

another really well written pattern ~ the knitting itself has a beautiful rhythm to it that’s easy to memorize and hard to put down ~ I’ve already pulled yarn from my stash for a second sandness as soon as this one is done (and I hardly ever knit 2 of the same thing, especially one right after the other)…I found myself putting #2 together in my head before I was halfway done with #1 (project notes here) :)

wool people vol 5 easily my favorite book so far ~ it was hard to choose the first thing I wanted to knit

and the yarn ~ I’ve used Hazel Knits before but this is my first Entice MCN project…that little bit of cashmere was worth every penny!

project notes:

• went down 1 needle size for both A & B to get gauge ~ used US5/US4 ::
• really glad I swatched since I would absolutely have run out of yarn if I hadn’t adjusted needle sizes
• I used a stretchy bindoff for the border which eats alot of yarn so I chose the final row 12 as my bindoff row instead of binding off afterwards (k1, k1, move both back to left needle, k2togtbl, k1, move both st on right needle back to left needle, k2togtbl, etc) ~ this put me with wrong side facing to pick up stitches for edging so I bound off the last stitch and reattached my yarn at the other end to begin the edging instructions
• used a US 4 for final edge but 1 size larger needle to bind off (US 5) with just a regular bind off
• the ‘small’ sized shawl is surprisingly large compared to the smaller sized shawls I’ve knit in the past ~ I don’t know that I’d consider it small, other than it’s the smaller of the two in the pattern

yarn usage:

• I had 235g of yarn & used 227.5g (7.5g leftover)
• the triangle used 60.5g (27% of total yarn used)
• the border used 154g (68% of total yarn used)
• the garter edge used 13g (5% of total yarn used)

preblocking measurements:

• wingspan = 48”
• sides = 32.5” each
• spine = 26”

blocked measurements:

• I only ran wires along top straight edge & pinned the scallops (I didn’t need to stretch this shawl any larger and it was laying nicely on the blocking mats so just pinning the sides and point worked well)
• this yarn bloomed larger than finished dimensions (I had a feeling it would ~ it blocked beautifully anyway!)
• wingspan = 56”
• sides = 42” each
• spine = 31.5”

relaxed size after blocking:

• wingspan = 55”
• sides = 40” each
• spine = 29.5”

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