I finished a shawl this weekend and am not sure how much I like it.

Last summer, at the RWA National convention in San Francisco, Pam and I went on a bit of a yarn crawl. We had searched online before going and had a list of potential shops to visit, and at one, I bought a skein of Aurora Yarns’ Whisper. It’s a 100% merino laceweight that is handpainted in northern CA – this skein was shades of fuschia, red, burgundy and purple. Very pretty. Very soft. The colours are incredibly rich, and there was 1250 m on the skein.

Once home, I had to figure out what to knit with it! I ultimately decided on a pattern from Fiddlesticks Knitting called the Peacock Feathers Shawl. And I decided to put some beads around each “eye” of the peacock feather. Here it is:It’s ENORMOUS, so hard to photograph. It has been blocked, and relaxed a bit when released. The first image (of the whole shawl) shows the actual colour best.

Here’s a detail shot of the corner:

It looks better in the photos, but I still think the lace is too open. Mr. C. says it looks delicate, which is another way of looking at the same issue. Since this yarn was so fine – much finer than the Zephyr specified in the pattern (now it specifies Exquisite) – I dropped 3 needle sizes, from 3.75mm to 3.0mm.

I think I should have gone to 2.5mm. I was worried about it being too small if I did that, but the finished shawl blocked to 80″ across the top. (The pattern has a finished size of 88″ across the top.) So, I could have gone smaller with the needles and still had a shawl plenty big enough.

But I’m not going to frog it!

What do you think?