'Tis finished.
I've been working on this shawl for months. As a refresher, it's Wendy Johnson's Two-Thirds Shawl from her Wendy Knits Lace book. It's really two shawls joined at one seam (ie, two triangles joined together).
Wendy writes great patterns. Her instructions are clear and easy to follow, and I had no trouble with the charts. There was some moving around of stitch markers for double decreases on certain rows, so I marked those right on the pattern, which came in handy since you have to do repeats of charts. The next time through them, I knew well ahead of time when I'd have to move markers.
Despite all the knitting required for this, I never got tired of the yarn (Fearless Fibers Tight Twist in Glorious Green). It has great stitch definition so the lace pattern really pops, and it felt really good in the hand.
This was knit top down, meaning the knitting started in the top middle and worked outward from there, so every other row added stitches. By the time I was done, I had 605 stitches. In knit-speak, that's a lot of stitches.
The pattern recommends a Russian bind-off, which I'd never done before. I looked up videos for how to do it, and it seemed awfully fiddley and tedious. I wasn't sure I wanted that much fuss over that many stitches. Then I flipped to the intro section of Wendy's book, and found a section on bind-offs. Her version of a Russian bind off is a lot less work than what I saw in the online videos. So I went with Wendy's version. A few hours of effort, and those 605 stitches were off the needles, although I did end up with a cramp in my right hand.
Blocking took awhile. I used all of my blocking wires and all of my T-pins. I was worried that it was going to turn out overly small, given what it looked like bunched up on the needles. I'm ruthless when it comes to lace blocking though, so it didn't know what it was in for.
All that work was worth it. It turned out really well and sits better on the shoulders than a regular triangle shawl, given how it's constructed as more of a wrap.
And I had enough yarn left over to make a cowl:
This is the Yarn Harlot's Pretty Thing.
It only requires about 160 yards of yarn, and it can be knit in lace weight or fingering weight yarn. The original pattern is lace weight yarn. I did mine in fingering weight yarn. The pattern has a nice big chart that is easy to follow and easy to modify. My only modification was to convert a couple of the purl rows in the middle to knit rows. It only took me a few knitting sessions to crank this out so it was done in days.
Glorious and pretty indeed.
