Finished....barely!

Today is the last day of the Olympics and consequently it's the last day of the Ravellenics.  How did I do?  Not as well as I hoped to do, but I did cast off my Cirruncinus shawl today! So, short of some knitting miracle where I finish my MKAL today (hey, it's possible!), then I'm one for one.  I'm slightly disappointed I didn't get more done, but I just didn't have the knitting time like I thought I would.  Honestly, I'm okay with that!  

Copernicus never seems to be far from my knitting

This version of Cirruncinus is knitted with Araucania Husaco in colorway #05.  I'm generally not a fan of knitting lace with yarn as highly variegated in color like this one, but this yarn just spoke to me.  I had to have it and I HAD to knit my shawl pattern in it.  However, after I paid for the yarn and got it home, I started to have doubts.  What was I thinking getting a color this wild?  Had I looked at my wardrobe recently?? I'm not a wild person!  And! What if the color would pool???  And what if the color pooled and looked terrible??  Well, I talked myself through this temporary crisis with a "you need to step out of your knitting color comfort zone and not worry about color pooling" and it worked.  I put my doubts aside, wound my yarn and cast on.

My Starry Night bag seemed a fitting project bag for this knit

To say that I'm glad I stuck it out with this color is an understatement.  The more I knit with it, the more I fell in love with the color & yarn.  I forgot about all my worries about how it would turn out.  A pattern like Cirruncinus and other sideways knit shawls where the main body of the shawl is stockinette are very forgiving for variegated yarns.  

I worked the pattern as written with one modification - I added one extra repeat of the Cirruncinus Lace to the straight section.  That made it 13 repeats instead of 12.  I just wanted to use up as much of this gorgeous yarn as I could.  How did I figure out I could knit an extra repeat?  I weighed my yarn.  At the completion of 11 repeats I had 33 grams remaining.  At the completion of 12 repeats I had 29 grams of yarn remaining, therefore each repeat was using approximately 4 grams of yarn.  I knew I wanted to reserve 25 grams for the decrease sections, so I knew I could safely knit one more repeat.  However, for extra insurance I put in a lifeline after the 12 repeat.  This way, if my gamble didn't pay off, then I could just frog (rip) back to my lifeline and started the first decrease section there. 

Lifeline!!

My calculations worked out and in the end I had 5 grams of yarn at the end.  That means this version of the shawl used 428 yards (95 grams).   I don't have final measurements yet as I haven't finished blocking it, but I will get those posted next time - hopefully this week.  I've missed two weeks of blogging, which I plan to make up for this week :o)

Only 5 grams of yarn remained