I have thought for the past few days that I would have a finished object to show you if I just held off on posting for one more day.

Well.

Instead, I have a not-finished object to show you. In fact, I have an object that is very likely on its way back to yarn.

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I have been motoring along on my latest shawl, which has miles and miles of stockinette and garter stitch. It’s been the perfect mindless knitting, and I made great progress on it at TwinSet Summer Camp. (Which reminds me…my goody bag was delivered to me yesterday, which means that I now have something to show you, and therefore another post that I can write.)

This week, I finished the main body section of the shawl and switched back to the dark purple yarn to finish the edge. I knit away until I thought it was time to begin the cast off, and worked a 3-stitch i-cord bind off all along the bottom edge.

Or rather, I cast off about two-thirds of the bottom edge, at which point I ran out of yarn. I muttered a bit, let it sit overnight, and then pulled back the cast off and tinked back an extra row of the border. I was pretty sure that would be more than enough to give me the extra little bit of yarn needed to finish the bind off.

Last night, I worked the cast off again. This time, I ran out about 1/5 of the way from the end. Sigh.

Fortunately, I got far enough in the cast off that I could lay the shawl out in full to see what I think of it. And, well, let’s say there are pluses and minuses.

The good:

– It’s almost done! Knitting has occurred!

– I like the raised welts in the contrasting color; I wasn’t sure about those at first, but I think they add nice texture to the main body section.

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– I like the distribution of color in the shawl, and especially how the hem echoes the neckline. I was hoping for a longer purple section at the end, but I think that what I have is deep enough to balance the visual weight of the different sections.

– I like the tiny rows of yo’s that separate the shawl sections. I added these as a decorative effect, and also as a practical answer to small differences in gauge between the different sections.

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….which brings us to the not so good:

– The gauge difference at the hem is big enough that the edging looks sloppy. I expected this to be a problem, since the main body section is stockinette-based and the neck edge and edging are garter stitch, but the transition was so smooth at the neck edge that I thought I could get away with it at the hem, too. Unfortunately, it appears that that’s not the case. I expect that this will get worse with blocking, not better. At the very least, I need to pull back to the yo line and decrease some stitches out of the purple garter stitch section so that it lays flat.

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– The overall shape of the shawl ended up much more like my Spiral Shawl than I had intended. I was going for crescent, not pentagon. The interesting thing here is that I increased even more per row that I did in the Passegiata shawl, but I changed some of the increase locations (in the Passegiata, all of the increases occur at the outside edge of the shawl; in this one, two occur at the outside edges and 4 occur in the body of the shawl). This seems to have moved me away from crescent and more toward pentagon, but it did smooth out the bump at the neckline that bothered me in the Passegiata. One step forward, two steps back, I guess.

– I was hoping that the increase lines would be more subtle, especially in the welted portion of the shawl. I noticed that the angles were more obvious than I wanted while I was knitting, but wanted to see how it looked when the final garment was laid out. For a more crescent-like look, I think I’d need to space those increases out more, and to distribute them more randomly throughout the rows.

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Now, the question is whether to just pull back and reknit the border, or whether to reknit the whole thing and fix the bigger shaping issues. At this point, I think I need to stop and do some careful analysis of the reasons for the changes that I did (and didn’t) like in the shawl shaping, and then I’ll decide whether to head back to the drawing board or whether to just patch up the border.

My guess is that I will end up pulling out the whole thing. The pentagon shawl shape has a tendency to sit nicely on your shoulders but doesn’t wrap around nicely, and it’s the latter quality that I usually appreciate most in a garment of this type. Since wearability is my primary indicator of whether or not a design “works,” it’s likely that this difference will be a deal-breaker.

Still, I think I’ll give it a day or two to settle, and then I’ll do some thinking about the structural changes that need to happen in order to get the shape that I want. Reknitting does give me the advantage of not needing to come up with a new project right away, though I was looking forward to working with a different color of yarn!