More About the Bigfoot Shawl

The body is a modified feather and fan, as is the yoke, as Stephanie noticed. Instead of just one row with all the yarn overs and decreases, followed by three plain rows, this version of the pattern has one row with all the yarn overs and half of the decreases and another row with the other half of the decreases, with two plain rows.

I've got to warn you about the book, maybe. If you don't want to knit top-down circular shawls, don't buy the book. That's all it has. I love them. Stoles usually take a certain effort to keep in place, like bent arms, a knot, or a pin, but circular shawls stay in place naturally. It's a lot the same as Faroe shawls.

I also really like the yarn. It's very soft and has extremely good stitch definition. It's not at all splitty, which is important when knitting lace with pointy needles. Of course I haven't blocked it yet.

Me make a gauge swatch and actually block it? Surely you jest. The closest I ever get to that for things like shawls and scarves is to pin out a section, still on the needles, after I'm a fair way through. (I'm not nearly so casual when knitting something that has to fit, though.)

I finally got around to really looking at the box of books from Zooba and discovered that they'd made a small error. I originally thought I had one cookbook and nine mysteries, which didn't seem quite right, but when I looked more closely I had one cookbook, eight mysteries, and a novel about Munchausen by proxy. This was a bit of a surprise, because that's not something I'm particularly interested in. It turns out that I had ordered two cookbooks and eight mysteries.

I've bought quite a few books from Zooba and this is the first error they've made. I wish I could say as much about some of the other on-line merchants I deal with. I fired off a quick e-mail and they mailed the cookbook yesterday (Saturday) and are giving me the novel (I think this translates as "it's easier and cheaper to write off the book than to go through the hassle of getting it back"). I'll probably give the novel to the Friends of the Library.