Emergency Executive Decision!

Evening,

I've decided to stop with the shawl.

1) I'm not enjoying knitting it any more, because I'm stressing myself out trying to knit it as quickly as possible. When each row is taking about 15 minutes to knit that's not exactly possible.

2) I opened it up fully on my 32" circs today and I have made a lot of mistakes from rushing. There are about 6 holes that I don't really know what went wrong, but I don't really want to give Gu a holey shawl! There's also a dropped stitch that I'm lucky hasn't run but stayed put. It's about 6 rows back though, and at 149sts per row, that's a lot of work to frog.

3) The killer: I don't think it's going to be big enough. I've checked the pattern again and I'm fairly sure that the designer was using a chunkier yarn than I am. I'm using DK yarn but the pattern says you should be able to get 4.5 sts per inch. That's not DK gauge. Gu's a size 16 and it's going to go around her shoulders, and I just don't think it's going to be big enough :(

So what's the plan of attack?

I'm going to take it home with me and cast off. Without cutting the thread. Then I'm going to measure it on Gu when I visit and see how much bigger it needs to be. Then I'll have fun(!) frogging the entire thing back to the start, and rewinding the yarn back onto the balls again.

Then I'll start again. But I'm going to go slowly, and aim for Christmas. I'll be saving my wrist, and my sanity!

xx