Last night I cast off my Ashburn Shawl!
There are still lots of ends to sew in and I need to block it, but the knitting part is finished.
After a hectic week of dyeing, re-skeining and twisting up skeins, AND putting in a few hours each day on the shawl, my hands were aching and a bit puffy. I powered through the last few rows last night, but I won’t be sewing in the ends for a few days because I need to give my hands a break. We’ll just see how that goes – not sure if I can last two days.
I’m happy with the result and I’m looking forward to seeing how it looks blocked. I did make two mistakes though – and they are silly, rookie mistakes.
The first mistake I made was misreading the pattern for the centre panel part. If you have a look at the photo to the right, you’ll see that all the little “star” shapes made by the slipped stitches in the grey line up. This is not right! The “stars” should be offset.I stuffed up the slipped stitched by trying to memorize the pattern – which I clearly failed to do. Still, it’s not a huge error and it was easily fixed by ripping back the grey part and starting that section again.
My second mistake is in colour choice – or at least the order of colours.
I’m kicking myself for using green instead of yellow (because I’m in love with yellow/grey/orange combinations at the moment). This isn’t the mistake though – the green looks just fine. The mistake I made with colours is not considering contrast before I cast on.
There isn’t a lot of tonal contrast between the green and grey colours – but the contrast between the grey and orange is great. It means that the grey slipped stitches in the green section don’t stand out as much as they do in the orange section.
This isn’t a serious problem – I’d just prefer more contrast between the green and grey.
Next task is to weave in the ends and give it a good blocking. I’ll start this in a few days. I’ll post details of how I sew in the ends and block such a long shawl next week.
