A couple of notes:

I did all the DYO as a single YO. When I did it as a DYO, the shawl got exponentially big quickly. Ravelry user Chanti has a great note about dropping the 2nd stitch of the DYO, but just converting it to a YO worked fine for me. With a hat tip to Ravelry user yesthatjill for confirming that was the way to go.

Also, big thanks to Ravelry ucer Chanti again for the pattern correction, which I’m copy-n-pasting here:

Row 1 Main Body
I think that it should read “K1,YO,K2 * K2TOG,DBYO * REP FROM * TO 3 STS BEFORE MARKER, K3,YO,SM,K1,YO,K3 * DBYO,K2TOG * REP FROM * TO LAST 3 ST, K2,YO,K1” so that it mirrors the first section.

That made all sorts of sense and kept everything in balance.

Blocking is magic.

This is the first project I’ve ever blocked, and seeing how that worked makes me better understand the whole process. When I took the shawl off the needles, it was all bunched up and the edges just wanted to curl to the center. I had faith, but I also had my doubts.

When I took it off the board, I was amazed. Everything stretched out really well and you could see the interesting stitch pattern in the FO. And the curl was gone. OK, some of the curl reappeared within a day, but not nearly as bad as pre-blocking. Seriously, look at the pre-blocking picture to see how silly it looked before I blocked it.