I have finaly been victorious over the yarn elves that were sneaking into my knitting bag all summer and adding extra yarn to my ball.  The Spiderweb Shawl is finished!!

You may remember back in July I started with this, 1300 yards of laceweight handspun BFL in the Tulip colorway from Spunky Eclectic.

I decided to use it to make a Spiderweb Shawl from Victorian Lace Today, but I wanted it to be different than the one in the book.  I loved the geometric design on the shoulder part of the shawl, but I wasn’t to keen on the more open lace for the bottom half of the shawl.  I wanted it to realy envoke the spider web it had been inspired by.

So, I began addapting the pattern.  I dropped charts B and C from the shawl and decided to work chart A until I ran out of yarn.  At the time I didn’t fully comprehend just how much yarn that was.  I stuck with the size 7 needles the pattern called for because I liked the drape of the fabric.  The pattern is written for either a half or a full hexagon, but neither shape seemed like it would stay on the shoulders without some wrestling or constantly having to be readjusted.  I wanted to be able to put it on and then move freely in my daily activities.

Being the geometricaly obsessed person that I am, I could see that if I made the shaw with 4 wedges instead of 3 or 6 that it would give the shawl a shape very similar to a Farose shawl.  It would have extra length in the front to keep it anchored as I did….whatever it was I was going to be doing.  So I started in on the project.

I knit, and I knit, and I KNIT, but my ball didn’t seem to be getting any smaller.  Every night I would think that the hole in the middle of the yarn cake was getting bigger, and every morning it would look just the same.  That is when I decided yarn elves were adding to the cake at night.

After 2 months of knitting (with some breaks for spinning and knitting socks.  I would have gone insane without some breaks!)  It looked like this

Just a little bit bigger than the book.  This was going to take forever!  I decided I was tired of having this project hanging over my head and that I wouldn’t knit anything else until it was done!

Well, here we are a month later and it is finaly time to reveal the finished product!

Here it is in its pre-blocked state.  It is dwarfing our Queen sized bed.

I had to block it on the floor and it took up every last inch of free floor space in our master bedroom!  I had to stand on the bed to get a full shot of the lace amoeba

I could have used some blocking wires to make the edges all straight, but I love that the points add to the natural spidery-ness of the whole thing.  It is going to be my Halloween costume.  I am going to wear it while I hand out candy this year.

Here is a closeup on the center detail

And here is how much yarn is left over from the 1300 yards I started with.

(BIG SIGH OF RELIEF!)

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