FO! Sidewalk (aka Pineapple) Shawl

I largely finished this a couple of weeks ago, but becuase the wedding shawl happened, I couldnt get around to end weaving, fringeing or blocking this until last weekend.

I'd seen this shawl before, and put it into my rav favourites a while back.  But I got the sudden urge to get this on the hook over easter, and went out and bought a bunch of yarn to get started.  I opted for acrylic - why not?  This particular brand is squishy and smooshy, and very soft!

I'll confess I never did get the pattern memorised. This took me AGES because a lot of the time was spent going backwards, frogging to correct a mistake that I'd made 4 rows down.  On my last repeat I refused to frog anymore, the rows were just SO LONG!!  I made some mistakes, so just fudged them rather than fixing my errors. I'm sure no one can tell!  My tips for avoiding mistakes with this pattern:

• watch those 3ch spaces (in the pineapple bit), it's very easy to miss one and then have to frog 4-5 rows because you don't notice to later.
• similarly, count your little 3ch spaces to make sure you're always doing the correct number.

I drew up a chart to make it easy to see where I was at at a glance:

Shawl stats:

Yardage:  Shawl weighs in at about 550g, using just over 7 x 80g skeins (yeah, I know that doesn't quite compute!) for a total of 1185.7 yards (1084.2m) (according to Rav) of yarn.

Pattern repeats:  The pattern calls for 4 repeats, but I think I did about 7.  After a rough count of the rows I got 72.  This might be a bit off, but you get the idea. 10 completed pineapples across in any case.

Unblocked:

77" (195cm) wide x 33" (83cm) tall

Blocked: (I used the steam blocking method which I trialled a while ago)

101" (256cm) wide x 47" (120cm) tall

I think I've blocked it incorrectly.  Looking at the project gallery for this pattern on Rav, I don't think the top should curve downwards, but should be straight.  Might try re-blocking, but it is acrylic so I may have already killed it!

Some action shots of steam blocking:

Unblocked:

Blocked:



Trying to look awesome, and failing >_<



I think I really love it.  It doesn't sit properly on the shoulders though.  Will require a shawl pin.  Ravelled here.  An obscene amount of extra pictures on my flickr. 

The Kitten and her insolent face.