The Blood Shawl

Well that's it’s official nickname now, because it feels like that's what it’s going to take to knit it.  Let me tell you the story.

The pattern, Garden Path Shawl, by Shui Kuen Kozinski is gorgeous and takes just under 1000m of worsted weight yarn (that works out to be one kilometre!).  I chose not to use the recommended yarn but went with Rowan’s Pure Wool Aran (in the shade “blood”, I’m sure that was an omen!), and calculated how many balls I’d need to make up the 1000m.  According to my calculations (which I checked and rechecked quite a lot, because I tend to worry about these things anyway) I should have had about 3 quarters of a ball left over, if not more.  You can guess where I’m going with this can’t you?  Believe it or not, by my guesstimates I’m short by maybe a ball and a half.  Now I could imagine using half a ball more than stated, because I may be knitting quite loosely, but surely not by enough to make that sort of difference?  The long and short of it (no pun intended) is that I’ve cast my net far and wide but I can’t for the life of me find balls in the same dye lot that are the same or even similar, so I’m stuck with having to reknit it, maybe on needles a size smaller and maybe missing out a few rows, which I’d really hate to do.

But that’s where I'm up to with the blood shawl, and it’s still sitting in the naughty corner because every time I look at it I think of all the hard work and concentration that went into it, and how much is still left to go.