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A couple of months ago my mom and I were perusing various free knitting patterns from knitty.com and elann.com when we came across the Victorian Lace Shawl. My mom indicated that it sure would be a nice thing to have in her wardrobe, so I offered to knit one for her. After knitting the Charlotte's Web shawl (pictured below), a shawl that required every synapse in my brain to be firing at all times while I was working on it, I figured every other knitting project I could possibly work on from then until the day I die would be easy by comparison.

Charlotte's Web

That's not to say I didn't enjoy Charlotte's Web, because if I hadn't then I wouldn't have offered to knit another shawl. Anyway, what I'm getting at is this shawl was a lot of fun to knit, and was pretty easy to keep track of while working on, which means only half my synapses were firing at a given time, which left the other half of my brain to think about other stuff, like does my lip gloss really taste like strawberry. I've worked on the shawl fairly steadily for the past three months. I had a few mishaps along the way, but generally everything went smoothly. Two things I learned from Charlotte's Web that helped tremendously with this shawl were: 1. embrace stitch markers, they really are your best friends; and 2. after a few pattern repeats I would run some thread through the stitches on my needle so that if I screwed up after that point, I wouldn't have to unravel the entire shawl.

Note the pretty pink threads running through the shawl.

Last night when I reached the point of being able to bind off, I debated whether I should go to bed or get the shawl off the needles. I decided to bind off. It took me an hour. I sat through an entire episode of CSI: Miami, something I've never done before. The pattern has you use a funky bind off that's supposed to help accent the scalloped edging created by the final lace pattern. Here's a picture of where things stood at 11 o'clock last night:

Note all the ends I have to weave in. The pattern uses three different lace repeats, starting with English Mesh Lace at the neck, Horshoe Lace, and ending with Mini Vine Lace, which makes up the majority of the shawl. The pictures don't do justice to the color of the yarn which is an indigo blue. The yarn itself is Peruvian Collection Uros Aran. Now the big quandry is where to block it out because once it's stretched out, it's going to be huge.