The Wedding Shawl Challenge
The bride has spoken: the Swallowtail shawl wins!
As luck would have it, I joined the Swallowtail Shawl KAL, hosted by Bronxie, the minute it was created, in August.
Now, the original Swallowtail shawl is more of a shawlette, a minishawl, if you will. I prefer large shawls myself, and it turns out that the bride wants a big snuggly warm shawl. Perfect!
I bought the yarn for this shawl (Misti Alpaca Lace) before I had even received the Fall issue of IK. And, by some miracle, the color I bought (moss green) is exactly what the bride wants! (Uh oh, I hope that the groom isn't reading this! The bride's outfit is being kept a secret from him...).
So you'd think that all these coincidences would lead to knitting happiness, right? Well it would be if I could follow a freaking chart! I've screwed up twice already... Nothing too serious, I just had to tink back and reknit. Usually I follow charts very carefully (some might say I'm anal), and maybe this time I got too sure of myself. *pout*
Anyway, here is what I had after 2 days of knitting:
In order to make the shawl larger, I needed to find out how big each repeat is *when blocked*. So I blocked my knitting on the needles! Very simply, I pinned a portion of the shawl and sprayed it with water. (You can see that I blocked only the right side of the shawl, then knit a few repeats which are unblocked and crumply). I measured the next day: 1.1" by 1.1" per repeat. This lead me to knit 19 repeats of the Budding Lace chart instead of the recommended 14. That way, exactly 11 repeats of the edging (Lily of the Valley chart) will fit in. And I didn't even have to do any math: a few KALers have travelled that road before me! A big thank you to the blogless Mary Tess, as well as Sia, Jeri, Angeluna and Risa.
12 days left! According to Rose-Kim's shawl percentage calculator, I am 73% done! As long as I follow the damn chart, I think I'll be ok.
