Finally! After working on this off and on for nearly half a year, designing the border three times and frogging twice, I now have a design I absolutely love. The finished piece is much larger than the bandana-style scarf I originally intended, but I’m pleased nonetheless.

The Smooshy with Cashmere was a delight to work with (except for the dye bleeding onto my fingers), and I used up all but maybe a foot of the Heritage sock yarn. I was holding my breath through the entire picot bind-off. (I know, I know, picots eat up a lot of yarn, and I never even thought I would like them to begin with, but I just had to have them for the top edge.)

I can’t wait to wear the finished shawl out!
…

I started this shawl for a couple of reasons.

• I had most of a skein remaining from an ill-fated attempt at custom gaming gloves for my husband that I wanted to use up so that it would stop staring at me and making me feel guilty.
• I noticed I had favorited a lot of striped patterns all at once, and thought it high time I knit something striped for myself.
• I had a couple of lighter shawlettes, and wanted to knit something a little more substantial for winter.
• It was the perfect excuse to pick up a luxury skein on a business trip.

I didn’t, however, have a particular pattern in mind, and it turns out that I’m a pattern-then-yarn girl, not the other way around. I couldn’t find a pattern that I felt matched the yarns and my mood, so I decided to improvise.

Improvisation turned out to be a lot harder than I thought, so I decided to purchase one of my inspiration patterns to help with the border section. Unfortunately, that pattern was constructed completely differently from the way I’d already started my shawl. Unwilling to frog and start over on a pattern I wasn’t completely in love with, I went back to my original plan of working with something from a stitch dictionary.

After painstakingly charting the pattern, teaching myself 5-stitch nupps, and knitting the border, I decided I really didn’t like how it turned out.

Oy.

So it sits in hibernation while I work on a sweater instead. I think I’ve reached a point of sufficient emotional detachment that I can frog some (or all) of it and turn it into a shawl I can love.

I just have to figure out what that looks like.

Things I Would Do Differently
Commit to a pattern, any pattern, before I actually start knitting. Sometimes modifications are necessary and even desirable, but it’s tremendously frustrating to go days or weeks without knitting because I’m suffering from indecision or endlessly recalculating stitch counts. Also, I had to weave in a bajillion ends because I’d cut the yarn in different places for different borders, and I had to use every scrap to finish the final border.

Finished Measurements
Width: 45 inches
Drop: 25 inches

Technical Details

• I didn’t really use a full skein of the Heritage sock yarn; I lost some of the yarn to the aborted glove project for my husband. Ultimately I used about 82 grams of black yarn in the finished shawl.
• I used a ChiaoGoo RED Lace circular needle (24”).
• Because of the dye bleeding onto my hands while knitting, I soaked the shawl in a large non-stick cooking pot in a solution of 12 cups of water and 6 tablespoons of vinegar to wet block it. Impatient dolt that I am, I forgot to rinse it in plain water afterward, so the finished shawl has a noticeable vinegar smell still.