blocking swallowtail

Here she isI finished the knitting two nights ago and blocked it last night. It's big. Bigger than I expected. I have seen where most other people who have made this shawl and posted about it on the web have remarked that it is very small. Well, not mine. I used a dk weight yarn instead of a lace weight and that is what really made the difference. It's 63 inches across the top edge and 30 inches from top center edge to bottom point which makes it about the same width across as the shetland triangle shawl that I knitted and slightly longer from top edge to point. I used 2 1/2 skeins of the Silky Wool on size 8 needles. The shetland triangle only used 2 skeins. I almost only bought 2 skeins for this one but am so glad I got the extra.

The purl 5 togethers went pretty well. I really didn't have the problem with them that others have had. The key for me was to knit the nupps in the preceding row very loosely. I also used my knitpicks options needles which have a fairly sharp point so that helped too.

I used the silky wool for the other shawl I made, the shetland triangle, but I can't help but wish I had used a different yarn for this one. One that has some shine from a refined silk wool blend would have been very nice. Silky wool doesn't have any shine even though it has silk in it. It is a fleecy, matte, kind of soft yarn, with a slightly bumpy texture. Because of my time constraint it was the best I could do short of getting an alpaca blend but I don't like the itchiness or halo alpaca tends to have. I'd like to try Knitpicks Gloss, or JaggerSpun Zephyr dk.

Now I'm looking at the Flower Basket shawl and the Leaf Lace Shawl both also by Evelyn A. Clark. The things I like about knitting lace shawls is that you don't need to worry about them fitting, the pattern repeats are interesting, and the transformation from unblocked to blocked is so dramatic. The bad thing is I really have no place or occasion to actually wear them. Maybe I could put them on my walls as artwork lol.