I have been making this one for a friend for two months. My, has it been difficult. We went with the kit online so for once it uses the same yarn as the actual pattern (something I pretty much never do), and...I had some issues.
- I did a little practice yarning before saying I could do the pattern, and the yarn said "worsted." Upon getting the kit yarn, it is not. It's DK.
- If I had used the actual needles I got the gauge at, it would have been waaaaaaaaaay too big of needles and made me insane. I used size 10's (per pattern, if not getting correct gauge) and I can't even imagine doing it in 11's or 13's or whatever it came out as the gauge for me. Heck no. Trust me, it was big enough as is.
- Frankly, I felt like size 10's were too big for this yarn, as everything was fairly loose and gappy and made it super easy to drop a stitch and not notice, and lose track of where the increases were. I took it out and re-did rows a LOT. A LOT. Here's comparison shots of the shawl with size 10's,
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- and if I'd knitted it on size 6's, which are much more appropriate to DK yarn size. I would have been a lot less stabby feeling.
- Even so, it was huge. I have a 52 inch cord I had to dig out and you can see it was even longer than that.
I actually kept track of how long it took to make this shawl. I normally don't really do that, but the friend asked about paying for labor and I thought, "there's no way in hell that can happen," but tried keeping track anyway by only working on this at home with a timer going. Of course that ended up being kind of difficult and I ended up pulling out so many times that I stopped timing those, but it came out to about 33 hours.
I'm really happy I managed to successfully finish it, though, because I had my doubts!
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