Today I got it in my head that I wanted some idea of the size of my Color Affection shawl. I don’t know if I’m gutsy, or stupid, or what. but it’s been looking so wonky to me and I have been wanting to know what it would look like stretched out. And, I have it on three pairs of circular needles, so it’s pretty secure. That’s the good news.

First, my before and after shots.

This is what the shawl looks like with no stretching at all:

Color affection, unstretched

You can tell that it is very narrow from top to bottom, and really long from side to side. Luckily the yarn has a lot of stretch in it, so I hope to gain some depth in the blocking. Sp my friend Rachel and I pinned it out, sort of, just to see what it might do at blocking time:

Color Affection, stretched

I’ve done some more studying of the shape of the thing since this afternoon so we can improve on our shaping technique when it comes to actual blocking. Plus I’m betting the fabric will cooperate a lot better when it’s not actually still on the needles, and wet. But after worrying about the size of the thing for some time now it appears that I don’t need to be too concerned, that is, if it blocks to something approximating the size shown here. In the second photo, it’s about 20 inches from top to bottom so far, and I’m not done with the border yet.

But, like I said, that’s the good news. In stretching it out we found a dropped stitch, early in the grey and brown section. That is, many rows down and quite near the beginning. It apparently happened some time ago, such that there was only a visible hole for a few rows, and then it sort of closed up on itself. I took the chicken’s way out and laddered it up a few rows and then pushed the errant stitch to the back and tacked it down with some yarn and wove it in. l learned tonight that I need to practice fixing garter stitch. I can handle 3 or 4 rows dropped by re-knitting, but a long ladder and changing direction back and forth with the crochet hook is tedious. I don’t have a smooth motion down for doing this and probably need to learn, probably before I start the shawl that is going to be for me.

Maybe I should have made my own shawl first, so that I could get the mistakes out of the way, but I was so anxious to knit for a friend that I didn’t think about it. Oh, well…. I learned some things today.

Clyde the Cat also had a good day:

Clyde the Cat, lovin’ life

“Man, that catnip’s some seriously GOOD stuff!”