Swallowtail FO

Dear blog,

Yes. The rumors are true, I have finished my Swallowtail shawl.

Lets have a moment of silence to commemorate this occasion.

I've been working on swallowtail for a little less than a year now. I first cast on in January 2009. The yarn (knit picks palette in the pool color-way), was a present from my Gandfather (knit picks gift card FTW!) and I cast on the moment it came in the mail. I loved the pattern instantly. It was challenging, but not hard. Fun, stimulating, exciting. It knit up really fast too, and I have NO idea why I sat it down. Probably it was school that distracted me, and by the time I went to pick the pattern back up my gauge had changed drastically and I'd switched to continental style knitting (learning how to do YOs the correct way at the same time, incidentally ). I knew I wouldn't be happy with the shawl if I finished it with these obvious changes, and that I'd have to frog it and start over, which I dreaded. Procrastinate procrastinate, until finally it's June of this year.

When I re-started knitting this shawl in June I initially didn't have any problems, but I got tripped up because I accidentally knit too many repeats of the budding lace chart. It took me an indecent amount of time to figure this out, but once I did finishing the shawl was pretty easy :)

I really want to shout out to testkitchen45 who has the absolute most straightforward and helpful notes on her project. Thanks to her I discovered that my choices where 1; rip out 6 or 7 rows of lace with out the help of a safety line or 2; do 19 repeats of the budding lace chart thus dramatically increasing the size of the shawl. I chose the second option and I'm glad that I did! I initially started with 3 skiens of palette and it *looked* like I was going to manage to squeeze by with that despite all the extra repeats, but I did end up having to order a fourth skein in order to finish the bind of. It was totally worth it though. I love the size, I love the way the yarn drapes, I think the nupps are charming. In general, I think this is the most awesome thing I've ever knit and I can't wait to get another shawl on my needles.

Before I go I do want to give sixer her due... both for taking the FO pictures once again and for not complaining *too* much that our room (allegedly) 'smelled of sheep' during the two days it took swallowtail to block.