road trip results

One thing road trips are good for, apart from spending quality time in your car cooped up with other annoyed people, is finishing long-marinating projects, especially if you have someone who drives while you knit. I am thrilled to report that my Follow Your Arrow shawl, that I started on January 13, is finally done!!  The last stitch was bound off on the way back from Cleveland, where the four-generation picture was taken. The ends were woven in and clipped early on Sunday, and I had the time to block it today.

Sorry for the less than artistic photo but it's pretty amazing I got it blocked tonight and I'm not going to ask too much more of my brain.

This one was a real booger due to my running out of yarn so close to the end of the last clue. I just realized that I never blogged about ripping out the entire border, because the striping solution I first tried didn't look quite right, and I knew that its half-assed-ness, plus a mistake I made when slipping the yarn (holding it in back instead of in front) would bug me the rest of my natural born days if I ever did manage to finish the shawl. Ripping it back allowed me to weigh the yarn, to discover that I had over 200 yards of brown yarn going into the final clue. It should have been enough. Oh well.

It was one of those projects that required the fortitude of angels because so much of that blasted knitted-on border had to be knit a second time, and I found it incredibly tedious the first time. Not sure why I didn't choose the other clue when I had it all ripped back, but my approach for each clue was to choose my anti-clue, i.e., the clue I normally would not have chosen, and certainly a clue that bored me so blind, I had to knit it twice, fit into that category. At least I am very happy with the solution of knitting the "fan" parts of the border in the other color, and best of all, this gave me enough brown yarn to finish this time. The rest of the shawl—I'm not sure. The jury is still out. Maybe I just need a little distance.