So peaceful, so meditative (all 408g of it, lol). I can see why people make more than one of these lovelies. It’s a soothing, mindless ocean of plain knitting. I never had to look down.

This shawl just kept evolving. I intended to do the whole thing in Grand-mère. Then I acquired the Birkenrinde, and I was wild to use it, so since I wasn’t terribly far along, I just made the switch. Then I loved how Birkenrinde looked with the purple, and wanted to keep the Birk in bands to look like ermine trim, but wanted to save Grand-mère for a future project, so I switched to Ballerina. I added the Olio Vergine stripe to make a gold accent for the “ermine and purple”. Overall, it’s, um, bright. A little too gaudy for my taste. But it looks good wrapped around.

Edging: I used the knitted-on edging from Ysolda’s Follow Your Arrow 2, because I loved its squishy little butterflies. Each 8-row repeat uses 4 stitches from the body. I’m holding the yarn double to give it some body. The edging used 180g of Natur, and seemed to go on for at least 30 miles, but looks SO good that I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

The edging is quite ruffly, despite doing occasional decreases where it joined the body (by knitting together with 2 body sts instead of just one). It blocked out nice and smooth, however. I worked every corner slightly differently, but by the last couple of corners decided that working one repeat over 2 sts (instead of 4) on either side of the marker was sufficient.

You’ll notice I didn’t use a provisional CO for the edging. I just couldn’t be bothered, and I stink at grafting anyway. I picked up stitches and worked a three-needle bind off to finish, and it looks just fine.

Increases: I decided to do kfb increases, but carried on doing the knit stitch on each side of the marker, so my increase column is a stitch wider than it ought to be. It’s symmetrical, though, so it looks fine.

Cast on 175 sts for a longer narrower profile. next time I might go longer and narrower still.