Color Affection

I started my Color Affection Shawl back on July 17th, 2013 with my knitting group. We started this shawl as a knit-a-long. More than half of our group worked on this shawl, and we’re about 13/14 maybe even 15 of us in our group. I got side tracked from it, working on smaller projects between starting it and finishing it, and then buying the wool shop back in September, kind of made my life a tad busier. My goal was to finish this in 2013. I came close to finishing it in 2013. I worked on it like mad for the last few days of the year (after finishing all my teachers gifts, and a few store samples that I had to do). However, I ran out of yarn on New Years Eve with 60 stitches left to cast off (At the end, there was over 425+ stitches in the edging).

I was in luck… I had in my stash, a 10g skein of an orange hand-dyed sock yarn that matched part of the Colinette Jitterbug Ginger Cinnabar that was in my shawl. However, I only found the skein on New Years Day, so I was able to finish casting off, and block my shawl. I thought I had enough to finish the edging. I needed in reality enough to make a 2” edge, as the pattern calls for, but I managed to get in 1 3/4” but… while I was doing my last few rows, I weighed the yarn after each row to see how much I used per row, to make sure I had enough to finish. I guess somehow I miscalculated by 60 stitches. But that’s ok… I managed to save my project with some miscellaneous matching almost to a tea, yarn.

At first, as soon as I cast-off, I hated this shawl. Not because of the color, because the color is stunning. I hated it, because, even though I did the yarn-overs at the beginning of each row as a lot of Ravelers have done, the shawl curled along the edge as it was extremely tight. It wouldn’t lay flat and I wanted to chuck it across the room in frustration. I did not notice this when I was knitting it. I can’t even describe what I mean. I probably should have taken pictures before blocking it.

My only hope was to block it. After blocking it, the shawl has redeemed itself a bit, luckily. It seems to be okay now.It still seems tight along the top edge, but blocking seems to help it lay flat. I wet blocked it on foam mats (first picture in this post) over night. Once it was dry in the morning, I un-pinned it.

Using 4.0mm (US6) needles, and Colinette Jitterbug yarn that I had in my stash since I owned Robyn’s Nest (my online yarn shop from 2007-2010), I used one full skein of the Ginger Cinnabar (orange) colorway, I used 0.85 of a skein of Elephant’s Dream and I used 1.13 skeins of Lobster Pinch (red). I still have 3.87 skeins of the Lobster Pinch and another full skein of Elephant’s Dream (blue) but the only one I had 1 skein of was the Ginger Cinnabar. If I would have realized that I needed more of the 2nd contrasting color, I would have used the Elephant’s Dream as the 2nd contrasting color instead of the Ginger Cinnabar and put the Ginger Cinnabar as the 1st contrasting color.

I don’t think I’ll knit this one again, once was enough.

Top Width: 75”
Bottom Width: 86”
Height: 16”