The Traveling Taryn Shawl

My friend Taryn just recently had a birthday. Over the summer I made a shawl for her, which wasn't a birthday present, but the birthday reminded me that I had not blogged the finished item. You get it, right?

Yeah, ok, anyway...

Recently (well, as recently as April and May), I have been working on getting Taryn into knitting. One of the last times I saw her we watched Glee and I taught her the knit stitch. She left that night with a nice garter stitch strip, an old ball of yarn, and some straight needles, and I don't think she's picked them up since. One thing I will say in defence of this is that Taryn is left handed. I don't know left handed knitting, so I had to teach her right handed. And not just right handed, but my own right handed warped version of continental. But she picked it up pretty fast.

(Coincidentally, Taryn is probably the third friend I've wanted to teach to knit only to discover that they are blessed enough to see the end of the paper while they are writing -- you right handers out there know what I'm talking about. I'm beginning to think that I need to teach myself left handed knitting.)

In any case, right before she moved, Taryn asked that I knit a shawl for her. She was particularly taken with the Traveling Woman Shawl. She even bought her own yarn for the project, which is like just giving me yarn because I had been wanting a good reason to re-knit the traveling woman now that I've learned more about lace knitting. The yarn she picked out was Knit Picks Palette in a gorgeous shade of green that is flecked through with purples and other shades. It took a ball and a half to knit two repeats of chart one (knit mostly in the car on the way to Ohio and then Pittsburgh) and one repeat of chart two. It went pretty slowly at the end, but that was a lot of stitches on my needle. I know, not as many as "real" lace shawls, but more than enough for me. I varied the needles up again as well from my original Angela Shawl, learning from the tightness of the bind off last time. The body is knit in size five and it is bound off using Jenny's surprisingly stretchy bindoff on size eights.

When I blocked it, the points came out beautifully. It does have this little wing action going, but I like to think of that as a nice, squooshy yarn hug. Plus it gives an appropriate amount of gothic flare to the piece.

When the Traveling Taryn Shawl finally reached its destination it had been in six states, waiting to meet its new owner.

I think that's the best anything I've ever made has ever looked.