May 18, 2012: Obviously, this is taking forever. Body of the shawl has been finished for months but interest withered when the edging wasn’t working as planned. I blame the fringe. It was the main thing that drew me to the pattern: Fringe! Beads! Drama! Couldn’t resist. When I got to that pattern section and did the whole cast on/cast off thing it looked terrible. Tried several different methods and could not get the fringe to look like anything but a sad, arthritic octopus tentacle. Words were exchanged but the shawl, despite staying annoyingly mute through the whole thing, convinced me not to frog it. Have now unenthusiastically conceded to finish it with the non-fringed edging. I hate arguing with knitwear. It never ends well. Hmmph.

May 27, 2013: After a very long time-out, The Strangled Flamingo is finally finished, but with a modified edge. After 7 repeats of the original edging it still never looked right and I concluded single-ply yarn was The Wrong Choice. So here’s how things ended:

• Completed charts A & B, purled wrong side row.

• Knit 2 rows, then beginning on right side worked yo, k2tog netting for 9 rows (keeping 2 knit edge stitches). Knit one row (WS).

• The tricky part and the only way I figured I could mimic Mr. Foley’s Fantastic Fringe: (RS) Worked a veil stitch across all stitches, but wrapped the yarn around the needle 9 times. It’s a similar to the one used in Ann B.’s Monteagle Bag from Mason-Dixon.

• Knit next row then with size 8 needles used Jeny’s surprisingly stretchy bind off

Crossing my fingers that blocking will be drama-free.

May 31, 2013 Finally finished, finished! Turned out better than I could have ever expected. Blocking wasn’t too terrible but I did give up trying to get a nice rounded edge.