On the blocking boards

Okay, so in case it's not apparent by now - I love taking pictures of knitted items blocking. Love it. Today I took 60+ pictures of my finished shawl including both pre blocking pictures and during blocking pictures.  Of course I don't have any finished(post) blocking photos yet, but those will come. What shawl am I talking about? Why I'm talking about my Springtime Bandit shawl!  You might recall that this month PAY is doing a KAL featuring the Springtime Bandit shawl, which is a free pattern on Ravelry available here.  I just finished it this morning including the binding off, weaving in ends & blocking.  

This guy just slept through all the binding off drama

The bind off had me sweating a bit.  Late last night I finished knitting the shawl according to the chart, but was running low on yarn.  In fact it was looking so low that I decided it would be best to put in a lifeline after Row 33 of the chart in case I had to rip back and bind off on Row 34 instead of after Row 34.  I wake up this morning, get my morning cup of coffee and almost immediately start the bind off. This is when the sweating commenced.  Prior to starting the bind off, I knew that I had approx. 7 grams of yarn (14 yards) to complete the bind off.  About half way through the bind off, I was tempted to weigh my remaining yarn, but decided against it.  It was either going to work or not work and there was only one way to find out and that was to keep on going.  Well, it ended up working out, leaving me with ~28" of yarn to spare.  I'm not sure I've ever come that close at the end, but I was just relieved to not need to rip back to that pesky lifeline.

My 28" of yarn left; the white yarn is the lifeline still in place

Now on to the blocking photos.  I've tried to take some so that you can see where I place my pins during blocking as well as some of the shawl itself.  I'll post again with more details regarding finished dimensions and some action shots of the shawl once it's dry.