Last year after I relearned to knit I decided I wanted to attempt my first shawl. Because really I got into this whole knitting thing to knit socks and shawls, right?! I’d been eyeing the Hitchhiker Shawl, but when my friend Nicole knit the Weigh It Shawl 1 I started thinking that might be the way to go. Nicole agreed that the Weigh It Shawl would be a good first shawl since it is mostly garter stitch and encouraged me to give it a try.

If you’re not familiar with the Weigh It Shawl, it basically calls for a skein of Miss Babs Yowza and doesn’t require counting rows or stitches really because you’re weighing your yarn (thus the name Weigh It Shawl). At DFW Fiber Fest in 2015 I saw in person and fell in love with the Zombie Prom colorway, so I knew that’s what I wanted to use for my shawl. I ordered a skein and bought the pattern and even treated myself to my first set of Signature Needle Arts circular needles. I shared my stash enhancement on Episode 4 of my podcast.

I really love those Signature needles. I did have a little bit of trouble with them near the end of the shawl where they would come unscrewed from the cable, but I think that was due to user error and no fault of the needles. But of course it happened when I had 8 million stitches on the needles and when that cable became unscrewed and a good chunk of those stitches fell off I about died. I checked with some other folks that assured me they had never had a problem with their Signatures doing this so I determined it was probably something with the way I was holding my needles or somehow twisting that cable enough that my knitting motion was causing the cable to become unscrewed. Here’s hoping I can avoid that in the future!!

I also had a few cases where I suddenly completely forgot what I was doing and started making something up or dropped a stitch and didn’t know how to fix it other than rip back, and so on. But, I think it’s just all part of the learning process.

And oh I was loving the color of my yarn. When I caked up my skein it was lighter on one end and darker on the other, so I started with the lighter end so that it would be darker as I knit to the bottom of the shawl. It’s subtle, but I like the effect.

In fact, I loved the color so much it inspired me to make a zippered pouch out of some of my Tula Pink fabric. It wasn’t big enough to hold my shawl, but perfect for a future sock project.

I also participated in my first Knitalong with this shawl. Suburban Stitcher hosted the Around Your Neck KAL and I really pushed to finish up my shawl in time but didn’t make it. I was all the way to my bind off when disaster struck – I ran out of yarn. So, I ended up setting my shawl aside for a good long time before I had the heart to go back and fix it so I could bind off. Because I’d already run out of yarn trying to bind off once, I opted to not do the picot bind off and instead used the Russian bind off she gives as an alternative. I will definitely give the picot bind off another try in a project in the future though because I loved the way it looked.

I finished it on the morning of New Year’s Eve. And I am thrilled with how it turned out. These photos were taken in extremely harsh sunlight, so it’s hard to get a sense of the beauty of this yarn, but you get the idea of the shape and size of the shawl itself.

Project details: My first shawl!! Weigh It Shawl 1 by Susan B. Anderson using Miss Babs Yowza in the Zombie Prom colorway. I used size 8 Signature circulars. Started on 4/27/2015 and finished on 12/31/2015.