A weaver's wedding shawl

Today, at long last and after many hours of knitting, I cast off the last stitch of the wedding shawl I've been making for my beloved Weaving Friend.

(Fresh off the needles, before blocking.)

After a false start on the wrong sized needles in February, I cast on for this shawl on March 4th, 2011. The pattern, selected by Weaving Friend, is the Aeolian Shawl, designed by Elizabeth Freeman and published in Knitty. The yarn is Posh Yarn's Miranda Cobweb, my favourite of all their yarns. It's a blend of alpaca, cashmere and silk, and is beautifully soft, with a stunning sheen from the silk. Beads are cream-coloured seed beads. I've had yarn and beads in my stash since early 2008, waiting for the right project to come along.

It's been slow going for the most part. I'm less surprised about this than I was, though - it ended up using 1745 beads! Almost every row was beaded, some as densely as every other stitch.

I made a few minor modifications along the way. Replacing the nupps with beads was the most major, but I also used a different left-leaning decrease throughout and didn't twist the centre stitch.

I ended up only using 495 yards of yarn. I'd expected to use rather a lot more, since the yarn's in 1200-yard skeins, but it's plenty big as it is!

(Blocking.)

I used 145 pins during the blocking process, and pinning it out took about 2 hours. Of course, after spending almost 8 hours on the bind off, it didn't seem that bad. Definitely need more t-pins though. I ran out halfway through pinning out the edging and had to use my quilting pins.

The best part? I was chatting to my mother as I finished the bind-off, and she remarked that if it was a wedding shawl, it should go through a wedding ring. And it does.