This shawl, like a lot of things I’ve knit this year, has been an instructive exercise in the power of blocking. You may recall how scrunched and curled this looked when it came off the needles? I blocked it, and now it looks like this.

Pattern: a very truncated version of Daybreak, which was super fun to knit – the stripes and slipped stitches are just enough to keep the stockinette interesting, and the extra increases make this a perfect shawl to wear as a scarf, with the way it curves.
Yarn: Koigu KPPPM, 2 skeins – one in grey, one in turquoise.
Needles: I used my 4mm Addi Lace circular, because I didn’t own the size called for in the pattern. It was close enough.

I modified the pattern a bit, mostly to allow for the fact that I really didn’t want to buy extra skeins of yarn, even though the yardage that I had was much less than what was called for to knit the smallest size. I worked fewer stripe repeats (nine stripes of each) and striped the garter rows at the end. I ended up having a bit of the turquoise left over, but I used up the charcoal almost entirely, and I’m a big fan of the way the finished product turned out. The other change I made was to switch the M1R and M1Ls at the very end of each row with yarnovers, to make sure that the edge was nice and stretchy.

Because I worked the whole thing on a slightly larger needle and blocked it pretty fiercely, the finished shawl actually a perfect size – just big enough to wear as a scarf, over a t-shirt with jeans, and just in time. Fall is actually starting to settle in (finally), and I can’t wait to wear everything I’ve knit this summer with my new fall wardrobe.