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The Valerie Shawl

I have this shawl. I lent it to Valerie when we started dating, during a weekend we didn't see much of each other (by which I mean every spare moment wasn't spent gazing adoringly at each other, which was weird, because we kinda went from 'dang, she's cute' to 'I might die if I don't see her for at least four out of every 24 hours' at warp speed). She tried to keep my shawl. This was not permitted, because it is the Best Shawl and I love it dearly. I am also not always good at sharing.

A pretty girl with a magenta-dyed undercut, standing in a sparsely decorated living room, with a big squishy colorful shawl draped over her shoulders. The off-white lace edge is a little crumpled, but the zigzag pattern still shows okay.
She's a moving target a lot, you'll have to make do with this.

Now she has her own.

A serpentine twist of spinning wool, fading from purple through yellow and orange to hot pink to purple-brown, teal, and purple-brown again, on a very faded turquoise bamboo mat.
There are five separate chunks of fiber here.
I spun the yarn for it, after casually leaving the fiber out and delicately asking what she thought of the colors and calmly agreeing that yes, they're lovely.

But I came up well short of the yardage I'd used on my original shawl, and I certainly didn't want her shawl to be smaller than mine, so I panicked a little and then stole bits of fiber from other bumps I have stashed until I had what seemed like maybe enough to spin up a replacement mini-skein. It was still about 50 yards short, but I thought I'd go ahead and start knitting, and if it looked like I'd still end up with a too-small shawl, I could steal a little more fiber to extend it again.

The small beginning of a garter stitch triangle shawl, on gold circular needles, arranged as flat as possible on a white and blue painted countertop with the cake of yarn nearby. The pink, green, and teal of the yarn is rich.
Baby shawl!
I don't work with my own handspun much, partly because I've fallen head over heels into hand sewing garments and devote less time to knitting than I used to, and partly because handspun, having already had hours of work put into it, seems too precious to risk on a project that might not suit it.

This is silly. Use your handspun. It was made to be used, and it's so frickin' rewarding to work with yarn you pulled into existence.

I knit and knit and knit, very carefully keeping my knitting stashed where Valerie wouldn't find it, and sitting on my hands to keep from sharing photos on any social media, where she would undoubtedly see it and figure it out. Colorful garter stitch is an instant giveaway to someone who's been asking and asking and asking for her own version of my shawl.

A small panel of white knitted lace with a zigzag design, attached to a crumpled pile of rich teal, pink, gold, and green garter stitch, and still on gold needles.
It took nearly a full day to decide on a lace pattern.
I can't remember where I found the lace pattern I used for the edging of my shawl, and didn't manage to dig it up from the vastness that is the online knitting community, but I found another that I like quite a bit, and which had a 20-row repeat that worked well with my stitch count on the edge of the garter stitch section.

I came up with the lace edging on my shawl because I wanted to avoid binding off a long edge; I knit fairly tightly, and it's difficult for me to intentionally loosen my work over a few hundred stitches. Lace at the edge also adds a graceful finish (thank god, because working two rows of lace for every bound-off edge stitch is a lot of extra knitting).

A white hand holding gold circular knitting needles up, in the middle of a row of white lace attached to a crumpled pile of teal, pink, gold, and green garter stitch. The lace-edged part of the shawl stretches out and away on top of a red fleecy blanket.
Approaching halfway.
As I got closer to the bottom corner of the shawl, I started counting stitches and calculating the rate I'd have to work extra rows into existing stitches to create enough lace fabric to "wrap" the corner without being seriously distorted. Somehow, despite having the same number of stitches on either side of the center spine of the shawl, I ended up working slightly differently on either side of the corner. Oh well; over an edge as long as these, fudging a few stitches hardly shows.

A large pink, teal, green, and gold shawl with chevron stripes and a wide white lace border, pinned out on a tee shape of blue interlocking foam floor pads, in a very cluttered room. There's stuff encroaching from all edges of this photo.
Never mind the partial stove hood in the corner.
I managed to clear just enough space in the center of my studio to block the shawl, which involved getting up early to pin it out before work one day, and then waiting two days for it to dry fully. The floor is chilly, and there's no fan in that room to help the process along.

Two triangular chevron-striped shawls stacked one on top of the other, with white lace borders, on a tee of blue interlocking foam floor pads. The top shawl is smaller and more muted than the bottom shawl, and its lace edge is about half as deep.
Hey, hers is bigger!
Naturally, I had to lay out my shawl on top of the new one to see how they compare. Clearly mine could use a reblocking. A few years of near-constant cold weather wear has reshaped it from a full triangle into a funny stingray shape.

And yes, I am trying to write my very first pattern, so those of you who prefer someone else do the finagling to get around corners in knitted-on lace edgings can play along, too. The math, though...I had some issues at the corner, and I'm not sure why. I'll have to sort that out first.

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