And The Winner Is...

...Damson, by a landslide. I did not work on anything else during my National Parks trip, other than this wonderful little shawl. I cast on as we headed West, knit it by our evening campfires, and finished it just as we got back into my home state of Wisconsin. And I am so in love with the results:


I bought the yarn from handdyer Knitting Notions during last year's Wisconsin Sheep & Wool and was so in love with the color that I have been saving it for something special. When Ysolda came out with her latest shawlette pattern on the day before I left for vacation, I knew right away that I had finally found the project for this green yarn. This is one of those projects that I adore so much that, once it is done blocking, I cannot take off for at least a week.


I should say that it was not a completely smooth ride to get to this point. I was within 5 rows of finishing with the pattern as-written, when I realized that I probably did not have enough yarn to make it to the end. After thinking about all of the possible solutions to this problem, I ended up frogging the lace section and reknitting it to save yarn. Here are my notes if you want to reproduce what I did:

- Omit the last 4 rows of garter stitch.
- Remove 2 stitches from every row of each lace repeat, one on either side of the double decrease. This means that you will knit 2 less rows in the lace section.
- Fudge the double yo border row. I think I knit 2 st instead of 4 st before starting the yo pattern and everything worked out fine.
- Work everything else as written, with the exception of omitting the stitches in the lace repeat.

FYI, the tag on this skein said it had 420 yards while the pattern calls for a 440 yard skein. I was working with the recommended size 6 needles, though I don't know how my gauge compares. I'm really not sure why the yardage was such a big issue but I will probably not be the only one with this problem, so I thought I would share my notes.


Besides the little hiccup with the yardage, the project went very smoothly. It was really nice to have something to knit in the evenings, mostly because I wanted to sit down and give my tired feet a rest! The trip itself was wonderful; husband and I went on several awesome hikes, enjoyed high tea in Canada, and took over 600 pictures! As promised in my last post, I'm sharing some of the best ones with you:

A double rainbow over Badlands National Park

A panoramic view of the Badlands

St. Mary's Lake in Glacier National Park

A mountain goat in Glacier Park

Left to right: Grinell Lake, Grinell Falls, and Grinell Glacier

A bighorn sheep on our hike up to Grinell Glacier

The sunset over Glacier Park on our final night