Perfect timing

So my Color Affection Shawl is done… I finished it on July 4 amidst searing heat on the East Coast.  I still don’t have photos of me wearing it but here are a few of the thing itself.  It is very long (the straight edge at the top measures 7 feet!) and is therefore difficult to photograph: This is the laceweight version of the shawl, done in Miss Babs Yet yarn (65% merino, 35% tussah silk).  I knit it on 3.0 mm needles and stretched it a little when blocking… you can see how sheer it is.  The green totally disappears against the grass in the background of the photo above. I used the yarnover trick everyone is talking about, and it helped a lot on the edges.  See? No puckering:

Still, the edge where I changed yarns was a bit tighter than the other edge, so next time I knit this I’ll take even more care to carry the yarn loosely.  More loosely than my usual loose knitting.

I used Jeny’s Surprising Stretchy Bind Off (JSSBO) on the dark gray edge and it worked well (I find Cat Bordhi’s video easier to follow than Jeny’s original instructions).  This edge might be a tad too corrugated for my taste but I’ll take it: Overall, I’m very pleased with this.  It’s very lightweight and lofty and will feel great wrapped around my neck on a chilly morning’s walk to work come fall.  I do envision wearing this more like a scarf than a shawl.  It’s just SO LONG!I thought these colors were fairly solid when I selected the yarn.  See what it looked like in the hank?  Perhaps I should have opened it up to take a closer look before I brought it home. The light gray yarn had a lot more contrast (with that deep blue) than I initially thought, and the green also had more highs and lows (and a few surprisingly flecks of red!).  People have knit this pattern with so many different yarns.  I think my favorites are the ones out of almost solid yarns, so that the stripes really pop.  Mine isn’t quite like that… but I still think the result is lovely and I’ll wear it a lot.

Now I’m just one of the 4,720 people in Ravelry who have knit this.  Talk about a viral pattern.