Picking up stitches along the top once the stripes have been completed:

• First note that there are 7 stitches from the provisional cast-on and 9 from the stitches on the holder. So for the small, you will have those 16 plus the picked-up 122 for the final 138.
• While the pattern says pick up the 122 stitches, you actually need to pick up and knit the 122 stitches. This means you continue on from knitting the stitches on the holder.
• There are 8 clearly-defined knobs on each side lace edge, giving you 16 stitches to start and 106 to pick up along edges of the stripes. That makes 53 to pick up on each side of the center.
• I have 38 stripes, 18 pairs of MC and CC stripes, so I decided to pick up 2 MC sts and 1 CC per stripe pair except for the last 3 stripes. The third of these stripes is the final MC stripe. The MC stripe before that, pick up only one st. Pick up no sts in the next stripe, the CC stripe. The final stripe, the central MC stripe will have two sts.
• The first time I tried the pick-up I picked up only 106 sts, picking up only one st per stripe, because I felt there were too many holes along the edge. But I realized that this would make the top edge too tight when I blocked the shawl, so I went back to picking up 138 sts.
• If I were to make this again, I would make an edge of two MC sts so that yarn changes happened two stitches away from the edge and the edge would be more normal for picking up stitches.

The striped part of this flew! The lace part is not hard, you just have to really pay attention.

The bottom photo is pre-blocking. You can see that it has a funny bump in the top middle and is a rhombus rather than a triangle. This totally went away with blocking, as you can see from the rest of the pictures, which are all post-blocking.

Isabel was skeptical that it was worth waiting for the blocking, but is really happy with the results of the blocking, and so am I.

This shawl is gorgeous and gets tons of compliments.

To match the mitts.