11-05-2024

• This is an excellently written and presented pattern that, for me took under 650y. It’s not a large shawl but I don’t love large shawls given that I’m a small person.

• It absolutely needs firm blocking with wires and pins (or pins at a minimum) as it looks as wonky as fuck when just off the needles. Not surprising given the shape, construction and cables. The cables look like 3D snakes till blocked.

• I can’t say I enjoyed knitting this. The first part was easy and portable but very boring. The second part, the edging, was very clever and it looks very cool, but I really don’t love knitting cables. When I work cable projects, it’s cuz I want the finished object. These cables were very easy and the charts were quite memorizable but cables are so fussy and, when you add in the i cord, which is difficult to rip back, and the varying incs/decs, it’s easy to lose focus for a minute (which then can end up taking a good 15 min to fix). Despite this, I may well make this shawl again because I love the design, the size and the crescent shape (the shawl shape I prefer).

• Over the course of time, I’ve come to feel very meh about the colour of this yarn. It’s well dyed but too tonal and I’m kind of done with this shade of pink. The yarn will likely work very well in terms of drape and I suspect it will block well given my previous interactions with this base.

• Because I’d used the yarn previously, in an intarsia project, I have 50 ends to weave in - this yarn contains silk and does not spit splice - I just hope that they do so invisibly.

• Interesting mistake: I intended to make the size large BUT I accidentally made the medium (circled the wrong stitch counts?!). That’s why I could only work 8 repeats of Chart B (edging)! I’m sure I could have made the large, given that I had the required yardage to do so AND I actually used the exact yardage stipulated for the small, though I made the medium. And now I have 90 yards left of this yarn that’s not thrilling. But there is no way I’d rip this back to the garter body to make it larger, not after weaving in 50 ends. I figured out my error when I was pinning the wet shawl and I noticed that my measurements aligned exactly with the size medium - and I’ve only used the yardage called for to make the small. So, by my estimation, this is a really good pattern for using up moderate amounts of yarn (600-800y) if you’re not into making sleeveless tops out of winter wool or yet another slip over (not that I’ve made one yet). Of course, YMMV.

• In terms of yarn usage:

206g at start, 26g at end, 180g used to make the shawl
3.47y per gram of yarn

What percentage of this was the body? 111g (62%) (386y)
What percentage of this was the edging? 69g (38%)(240y)

For Future Reference: I want to make this again with the Sonder Lux Sport 3.28y/g and I have 191g or 626.5y. According to the math, I should almost be able to make it as I will use less yardage/g with the Sonder than the Fino (albeit not by much!).

119g (62.3%) (390y)
72g (37.7%) (236y) - 626y

But I do have to go up a needle size give that the Sonder is a sport-weight and the Fino is fingering (though not fine fingering). And that may well use up more yarn than I have. I could either just wing it, and stop at the size small if I estimate that I will not have enough to get to the medium once I get to the full stitch count for the body in small OR I can use up some fingering - a grey that also has a very green undertone. This yarn is speckled but very lightly. I estimate that I can do the first ~5g with that yarn and then complete the shawl on US5 with the Sonder Lux. We’ll see how it goes.

Pre-blocked dimensions: 50” length / 12” depth (doesn’t include the pre-blocked dip at the cast on point)

Post-blocked dimensions: 66” length and 14.5” deep from the cast on longitude