FO: Mystery Thyme Shawl

I’ve had this finished for a while, but this was the first time I had a chance to get photos. Bad day for it, though – it’s very windy and most of the photos came out with my face covered with hair, or with me squinting from getting dust in my eyes.

So this is about as good as it gets today.

The shawl was made from two skeins of madeleinetosh tosh merino light in “Thyme”. The mystery part was that I only had a vague idea of what it would be when I started knitting it. (It’s sort of like the joke about computer programmers: “You go find out what they want, and I’ll start coding.”)

I wanted it to be a half-circle with a garter stitch base, and something that would be totally reversible. I also wanted it to be bigger than the other half-circle shawls I’ve made. But other than that, I decided to just figure it out as I went along.

My original idea was to have some sort of pleated ruffle as the edging, but I knew that would take up about half the total amount of yarn. So when I used up the first skein, I put the shawl on waste yarn and gave it a wet block. I could see that it wasn’t going to end up as large as I wanted, so that idea was out.

I definitely didn’t want to do a sideways knitted-on border, because the second skein of yarn was darker and had more color variation, and I thought the color changes would be too distracting. This turned out to be a good choice, because there were some definite dark streaks in the second skein.

After contemplating options for a lace border that would be reversible, I decided to just make it easy on myself and do a garter-stitch-based feather-and-fan pattern. Not very exciting, but effective enough. I continued to knit the body until I had about 60 grams of the second skein left, and then started the lace.

I’m happy with the size – worn as a shawl, it covers my arms down to my elbows. But I can also wear it as a big scarf scrunched around my neck.

The madtosh yarn is soft and yummy. There might even be a few more evenings that are cool enough to wear it before the summer heat really hits.