September is also turning into Shawl month!

I started the idea of a KAL for the Little House Shawl in the HaldeCraft group on Ravelry a few months ago.  The dates to actually work on the KAl were determined to be the first of August through the end of September.  I chose my yarn and waited to see if participation would pick up, just because there was interest when I first mentioned the idea.  Here is my yarn:

I chose The 40's Have Called in Marion.

At the end of August, I was really ready to get started on this shawl so I cast on:

I used the backwards loop cast on for the first time and it worked out wonderfully for this project!  No guessing how long of a tail to start with for the long tail cast on method, and this backwards loop method is plenty stretchy.  Casting on nearly 400 stitches was quite a work out and I must have recounted 4 times before starting on row 1 of the pattern.

The Old Shale lace portion is the first thing you work on for this shawl.  It is easy to follow and memorize.  I placed stitch markers after every two repeats just so I would know if I did anything wrong with plenty of time to just tink back rather than rip back.

The Old Shale looks just lovely in this colorway.  No pooling anywhere.

Here you see I have finished the lace section of the shawl and now just have the decrease section to complete.  It was so nice having the "hard part" out of the way at the beginning.  The rest of the knitting really flew by!

After two decreases I started to worry there would not be enough yarn in the original ball to make it through the shawl.  I wound another skein I had in my stash and because it was so much darker than the first I started alternating skeins every two rows.  As it turns out, I would have been just fine with the original ball and maybe had 2 grams left after all was finished.  It is better safe than sorry though.

Here you see I finished!  I still need to soak it, block it, and get outside action shots though.  I hope to get to that in the next few days.  Let me say how amazing and what a pleasure it was to only have to bind off so few stitches and on a shawl!  I will definitely make this again.  This one only took me 12 days start to finish.

Again, the pattern is called Little House Shawl and is a free pattern on Ravelry.  Here is the link to the free pattern.