In Which the Pirate Finishes a Shawl.

I finished knitting and blocked the Sizzle Pop shawl – what a difference! That’s a 12″ ruler for scale in the before-and-after photos, and wow, look how much it grew! The shawl drapes beautifully now. It’s soft and squishy and relatively lightweight for its size, and I absolutely love it.

I only made one small change to the pattern, and that was to knit an extra repeat – I had enough extra yarn, and I was concerned that the finished shawl would be a little on the small side. It is not, now. :)

The pattern was well-written and fun to knit! It went faster than I was expecting, except for the parts where I got distracted and made mistakes. In most cases I wasn’t going to be able to just drop down and fix the error (yay, brioche?) so I had to un-knit, which takes for-freaking-ever (yay, brioche?) but was totally worth doing as I wouldn’t have been able to live with the errors.

My version of Sizzle Pop used a skein of Malabrigo Sock in 120 Lotus, and a skein of Sheep’s Clothing Yarn Co. Fable Fingering in Nebula Speckle. There’s a little bit of each one left over, but not a lot. Not only do the yarns coordinate perfectly with each other, but they also go well with my hair – right down to the little pop of blue.

This will definitely not be the last brioche project, or the last shawl, that I’m going to knit. It was so much fun to work on, and the results are spectacular. I have so much fingering weight yarn in my stash, my sock drawer is already overflowing, but my shawl-and-wrap shelf still has plenty of space left for more projects. The next one I’m working on is Casapinka’s “Breathe and Hope” pattern, which is two-colour but not brioche. I’m making good progress on it, and will have pictures to share soon!