May 3, 2013
I’m pleased to note that this shawl is pictured in this month’s issue of UK knitting magazine THE KNITTER. :-)

April 3, 2013
Finally finished, steamed, and photographed! Amazingly, this shawl lay dormant for some time until I picked it up in February of this year and suddenly it started going like gangbusters. I likely would not have got so much done so quickly if I hadn’t come down with a killer chest infection in late February and been signed off work for two weeks. I’m so pleased with how this turned out.

January 14, 2012
Why hasn’t more been done on this project since October? If I told you the project still fills a needle more than 150cm long, would that help? I’m about halfway through the first section at this point. Trying to think of ways to display the length of the project in a photograph is a bit daunting, as you can see from the washing line photo, which at least provides some scale!

Begun in October, because I couldn’t resist, this is a great example of a lace project that’s incredibly impressive looking, yet so easy to knit I can manage it on the train during my commute to and from work.

Careful pattern-writing even makes the 878-stitch cast-on a breeze! Well, it felt like a breeze, anyway -- until about four rows in, when I realised, I’d shorted the cast-on by 24 stitches. As I’d only made a few corner decreases at that point and the pattern wasn’t defined yet, I elected to drop down, cast on the additional stitches, and work four short rows to build up the bottom of the shawl, rather than ripping out and casting on again.

The last six photographs illustrate how I did this:

Original edge of shawl

1. Removing the four-stitch garter edge
2. Garter edge unravelled
3. Dropping down to add a cast-on loop
4. Casting on additional stitches
5. The join! (Loops will be removed in finishing)