Fortunately the pattern is fairly intuitive and the charts bold enough for me to work at this very slowly.

Row 5 of Chart 3 hates me. :(

Shawls are like printers. They smell fear.

I also think shawls are much like what it must be like to give birth to twins: you struggle across a particularly evil row and you’re so glad that you’re finished, oh the relief! - then you realise that you’ve got to go through all the same AGAIN on the other half.

Row 7 involved a lot of tinking down to what claimed to be Row 4 to correct weird things. It got easier after Row 13.

I still don’t know what wrong in Row 5. I knitted it twice and all.

Started Chart 4, three rows in I see that I only have the tiniest amount of yarn left … EEK! And that is why I have such a hate-love relationship with this pattern, you finish Chart 2 and you’re like ‘why do I have a WHOLE ball of yarn left?! This is ridiculous! I must knit more repeats! What a waste of yarn!’ I learnt from my previous Ashton attempt not to fall into this trap but nothing prepared me for how little yarn I was currently facing … I tried knitting faster but with something like SIXTEEN (yes, the capitals are completely necessary) rows left including a very generous bind off there wasn’t a lot of hope. I kept knitting - what else can you do when faced with complete and utter doom? Then I discovered my cake had split in half and I had actually twice the yarn I thought I had. I breathed.

Ran out of the first half cake during Row 10 so very glad that wasn’t all the yarn I had!

Cast off using a single straight 5 mm pin. The cast off uses a LOT of yarn.

Finished size once pinned 168 x 86.5 cm. I always seem to block longer than wider on my shawls. Oh well.

SIX GRAMS LEFT!