FO : Sunshine for Grandma

Dear blog,

I am pleased to announce that the sunshine shawl was completed successfully in time for x-mas! Actually, I finished it on December 30th, which gave me plenty of time to block it before giving it to my Grandmother when I visited her on New Years Eve.

This shawl was the biggest project I knit this past year, and the one that stayed with me the longest. I ordered the yarn ( 4 skiens! ) from a local yarn store when I first moved to DLI, and it took over two months for the order to come in! I started knitting it in June. I've been drooling over this pattern since I put it in my queue in 2008, and I was enjoying every minute of it! When I visited Hearst Castle? This shawl saw me through the long, winding car-ride.

No true epic is without it's trials. Chart H : The knitted edging.

I've knit several shawls before this one, but they all ended with a simple bind-off. A knitted edging is different, it involves creating a certain number of new stitches, and working a charted pattern on just those stitches (using a DPN ) knitting one stitch from the DPN together with a stitch from the main shawl every other row. Now that I've actually done it, it seems pretty simply and I think I can safely say I've tucked this technique under my belt. But friends, I have to admit, I am directionally challenged. The instructions for the edging confused the living daylights out of me. I googled it, I looked for youtube videos. I scratched my head and called my sister on the phone. All of that research ended with me knitting the edging chart as a pattern repeat - around the ENTIRE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE SHAWL. Apparently, that was not correct.

If you are planning to do a lace edging soon, take this to heart. When instructions say "You are going to need a DPN for this" and you realize that it is very very easy to do it without a DPN, that means you are wrong. STOP KNITTING and figure out a way to follow the instructions that would be impossible without a DPN. Pro tip, the edging chart? Only one repeat of each row. So yeah. I tinked back upwards 600 stitches and pushed the shawl into a drawer where it stayed until Christmas break, where I had my sister show me step by step what to do. Twice. Yup. Makes so much more since now. I felt really really ridiculous and embarrassed, but I will never make that mistake again, and I think I learned something. Plus, four days later I got this shawl, which is gorgeous, and which I am very very pleased with. The next lace thing I knit I'm keeping :K