And we have a winner!

Edited to insert my “gold medal.” Yay!

Luckily the yarn shop had saved aside some of the yarn for me in the same dye lot, just in case, so when I gave her a rather frantic call on Friday morning she said she’d wind off another quarter pound for me and set it aside for when I came by for the knitting night at her house that night. Phew. So even though I was intending to finish the shawl yesterday (since I had it off from work) I spent a good part of the day sleeping (and recovering from the stupid head cold) and instead made a little more progress on the sweater. I’ve seamed the second side and attached the first sleeve and tucked in all the ends, so all that’s left now is to seam and attach the second sleeve and add the edging for the placket, and it will be done. And with both sides seamed and one sleeve attached I was able to try it on to see how it worked so far, and it’s actually working pretty good. I suspect I will need to do some additional tweaking of what numbers I feed into the Sweater Wizard software next time, but for my first autogenerated pattern, I’m quite pleased.

Last night at the knitting group was a lot of fun. We all crowded around a table and fondled all the new yarns she’d picked up while at Stitches West, and when she mentioned that she’d just received the very last packages of Opal Sock Yarn in tiger and flamigo and ladybug (and that those designs are being discontinued) there might have been a teensy little dash into the yarn bags and some clutching of balls of sock yarn tightly to chests (I already had the tiger, but I really could not resist getting the flamingo this time too)). She gave me my extra yarn and i heaved a very huge sigh of relief and then promptly got right back to knitting. I made it to the first two rows of garter stitch before the knitting group broke up, and sleepily worked my way through about 1 1/2 more rows last night, and then got up this morning and finished off the rest. The choir was singing at a funeral today so we had rehearsal, but there was just enough time between rehearsal and funeral for me to dash home, weave in the ends, give it a bath, and pin it to a large blanket to lay it out on the lawn (thank goodness for sunny, warm days).

. Please ignore my poor blocking skills – it was straight when I pinned it to the blanket on the kitchen floor, but transferring it to the back yard got things a little discombobulated and I was kind of in a hurry.

A few hours spent baking in the sun, and it was done, a day early, no less. And it turned out better than I could heve even dreamed.

All the important facts:
Pattern: Irish Diamond Shawl, from Cheryl Oberle’s Folk Shawls
Needles: 4.5 mm Inox circulars
Yarn: Jagger Spun 2/8 Heather in Chokecherry

Thoughts: The shawl pattern was extremely well written and I am already eying a few more in that book that I would love to make. I loved working whith the Jagger Spun, especially for this particular shawl, and am pondering ways in which I can use it again, since it comes in a truly amazing assortment of gorgeous colors. The wool is a little rough, but the rustic look is exactly what I wanted, and the fingering weight means that the shawl is heavy enough to provide warmth. The needles worked out fine – the ends are nice and sharp, although this wasn’t as critical for this yarn as it’s been for other lace knitting projects. The only thing I would change is to use a MUCH longer circular. The final stitch count – 762 – was about 200 stitches too many for the length I was using.