Kauni Shawl

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for the Kauni Shawl KAL on Ravelry. I had heard about the pattern, Revontuli, from a fellow knitter on the Seattle to Portland Yarn Train. When I checked the pattern out later on, I found that it was very pretty, yet simple. I also saw where someone else had made all of the increases as yarnovers, instead of doing most of them as make ones. This simple change makes the pattern much lacier and far simpler to knit. If I remember correctly, the point of the knit along is to finish by March 8th and I was a little tired of my current sweater project, so I cast on last Saturday evening. By Sunday night, I had just about 20 rows left to go and finished on Monday afternoon. The picture above is from while it was drying. I’m not sure if is the cold that I had, or the lanolin in the yarn, but I found it difficult to breathe at times while working on the shawl. The yarn is rough to knit with, as well. When I was almost done, I wasn’t sure if I would ever wear the shawl, or just give it away. I finished any way and set out to soak it for blocking.

Because of my difficulties with the yarn while knitting the shawl, I took a few extra steps when blocking. Usually, I just soak it in a wool wash, spin and pin it out to dry. Instead I spent extra time to do the following: I partially filled up my top loading washing machine with “hot” (really just very warm) water and added some regular, scent and dye free clothes washing soap. I allowed the mixture to agitate for a minute or so and then added my shawl, pushing it under the water. I left this in the machine, which I had turned off, for about 30 minutes and then restarted the machine on the spin cycle. Once the excess water was removed, I pulled the shawl out and repeated the above process with cold water and fabric softener. After the rinse, I pinned the shawl out on the floor of my sewing/craft/computer room.

After spending the extra time to soak this shawl twice, the project smells and feels so much better, that I will probably wear it and not just give it away! Whoohooo!!