The Shawl

I’m going to come out clean. For the past few (many) months I have been knitting a shawl behind your back. I just never felt the need to talk about it and now I’m suddenly close to finishing it, which is no small feat.

For my birthday this year I got the Þríhyrnur og Langsjöl book (Three-cornered and long shawls) from my parents and for a long time I browsed through it trying to decide which of the many beautiful shawls in the book I should start with. I was most fascinated by the more down-to-earth shawls, not the fancy bancy types. I wanted a shawl for the common people, something nice and warm to help me through the winter.

I’ll admit now that I am a total product knitter. I don’t care if something is going to be the most boring thing on earth to knit, I’ll knit it if it looks good. Yep, I’m a sucker for looks. So it came to be that I chose “ferhyrndur herðaklútur” (lit. square shoulder cloth) as my first shawl, I liked the way it looked. Never mind that the stitch pattern consists of two different stitches with every other row knitted plain. Never mind that I have to knit those two stitches for all eternity, with no decreasing going on since the shawl is square. No, no, I’ll do it because it’s going to look freaking great! What I forgot is that being a product knitter I am rather fond of seeing things progress, and preferably with high speed. Do you think that this shawl grows quickly? Nope. When each 204-stitch row adds less than half a cm to the length, it takes for-freaking-ever to knit. And it didn’t help that I was incapable of concentrating on it, when seeing no progress at all, so the only times I actually did some knitting on it were the occasional bus trips when I didn’t have any other portable project, and a few plane rides between Iceland and Finland.

This autumn I fortunately got a strong urge to finish my unfinished projects and move on with my life. For the past two weeks I’ve been knitting almost exclusively on the shawl, and to my great surprise the darn thing grows! Here’s what it looked like on the 30th of April:

This is the state of it on May 11th

and here’s what it looks like now, all 79 (out of ~96) cm (31 out of ~38 inches) of it

The end is in sight, but naturally I’m running out of yarn. I have 20 grams (0.7 oz) left and from my oh so scientific estimates I think I might need around 50-60 grams (2 oz) to finish. The error bars here are quite big, so I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. I figure that if the length in unblocked state is, say, 5 cm (2 inches) smaller than the width, I can just block it out since the shawl stretches pretty awesomely. Yep, it shall all work out – never mind that this is my first shawl and I have no idea whatsoever as to how much you can torture shawls in the blocking process. It’ll all work out.

Then the only thing left is the border which is knitted separately. The pattern instructs you to sew it on in an invisible fashion so that both sides of the shawl can be used. Is there an experienced shawl knitter out there who can suggest a way to accomplish that?