Ah, the shawl of horrors. You may ask why I would include this travesty of a garter-stitched “thing” in with all of my other, nice projects, but the simple truth is you’ll need to see it, as it has become a reference point for all present and future knitting projects.

Long ago in a time when I thought Michael’s and Jo-Ann’s held all the yarn in the world, I found this great ribbon yarn in soft blues and greens, and when I paired it with some leftover gray yarn, it reminded me of a stormy seascape. I decided to make this my first real shawl, and while it would be a plain old rectangle, I would do purls and slip-stitches and faux-lacy edgework. Hahaha! Well, I had some problems. Namely, I was too busy to invest in a big project like this, as I was going to graduate school full time and working two jobs. So I would put it away for months at a time. I never marked where I was, so I kept either a.) messing up, or b.) forgetting what I was supposed to be doing. Either way, I discovered just “making it up as you go along” doesn’t work too well without notes.

I frogged this damn shawl AT LEAST 4 times, and perhaps 5. I still remember the priceless look on my roommate’s face when she came home one day to discover a sea of yarn covering the living room floor, and me furiously working away at restarting the shawl from my papasan chair.

Anyways, as you might suspect with a project that has no parameters, I kept running out of yarn and having to buy more. At one point the frogged balls of yarn were about as Large. As. My. Head. Each. Nearly three years later, after finally saying “screw fancy, let’s just get this thing knitted,” I refrogged it yet again and just finished it. Thank God.

Then I noticed something interesting. My poor, shredded, mangy shawl didn’t really look like the sea. No, the gray color was too dark for that. But the ribbon yarn created interesting flecks of light … kind of like the scales of a fish. A very dead fish.

$%&%#!

One the plus side, it is very warm. And the cat loves it.