Virus Shawl

I'd had the free pattern for this shawl queued in Ravelry for a while. It was such a popular pattern and everyone seemed to find it easy, so I thought it might be a good bet for increasing my crochet confidence.
Stylecraft's 'Cabaret' yarn, an acrylic DK plied with a polyester tinsel thread was a popular choice, so I bought three 100 g balls (a quantity recommended by others making the same shawl with the same yarn - ah, how wonderful is the Ravelry community for sharing details like this!) in the 'Rainbow' colourway, deciding this would be a Christmas-New Year 'hibernation' project. In the event, I didn't start it until early January, still intending this to be a shawl for myself.

Before Christmas, my friend Chrissie came round for a cuppa. She's had a pretty miserable year, losing her mother and learning that one of her siblings has been diagnosed with cancer. I showed her the yarn and she smiled and squooshed the ball, admiring the softness and the colours. Seriously, the photos don't do this yarn justice. It is wonderfully soft and squooshy, the colours are lovely and the tinsel thread twinkles.

As someone else commented, this yarn isn't great. I had a knot in one ball, a weird thick bit in another, and found that the rainbow inexplicably contained shades of russet and khaki green in with shades of blue, green, purple and pink, (rather than any red, orange and yellow) which didn't seem to follow a pattern. The yarn itself is a bit like a single with a loosely plied tinsel thread. The tinsel thread would break if it were tightly plied, but it sometimes snagged and pulled and I managed to break it in a couple of places. The ball band suggested working from the centre, but I couldn't find a centre-pull end easily and when I did find one, it just pulled a snarl of yarn from the centre of the ball. As others found, the balls are soft and loose, so great loops of yarn fall away from the ball until you're about half-way in. I found them quite easy to manage; even when the loops started to tangle, gently lifting and separating the yarn loops was enough to avoid knots. I doubt I would use this yarn for a cardigan, because matching stripes would be impossible, but I'm going to buy more (perhaps in another colourway) to make a shawl for myself.

Just after I started the shawl, I saw a Facebook post from Chrissie that she had lost her mother-in-law. I'd only just seen a Christmas photo, with Chrissie resplendent in a red dress, her MIL smiling at the head of the table. As I crocheted, I kept seeing Chrissie in my mind's eye, smiling as she caressed the yarn, and decided that this shawl had to be for her, with love.

It really is an easier pattern than it looks and I started to appreciate crochet in a way I hadn't before. The rhythms can be more complex than that of a row of knit or purl. Gone wrong? Just pull the stitches back to where it was right, pick up your loop and carry on. My 'Longshore' throw has been hibernating for a few years now, as I fell out of love with it, unsure of what I was doing and becoming increasingly inconsistent. I now feel I can pick it up again, even if I frog it back and redo it.

The pattern repeats over 4 main rows: create a foundation row of loops creating chain spaces, (UK) trebles in clusters in the larger chain spaces, with loops in between. The third row is trebles onto trebles and the last row is treble+chain 1, before it repeats, As I was getting to the end of the third ball, I finished up on a row 4 and went back over the edge with double crochet into each chain space, with a picot in the centre of each arc.

What do you mean, I can't sit on it?

I took a couple of photos of the finished shawl and marvelled at how light and drapey it was, working just as well as a scarf. I hadn't washed and blocked it (or taken any measurements, but it's about 1.5 metres/5 feet wide) by the time Chrissie came round in mid-January, but she was thrilled with it and immediately put it on. Smiles all round, (except for Xena with the ridiculously long whiskers, who was a bit put out that I wouldn't let her snuggle into the shawl!), job done!