My quest for self-isolation – which is the same as my quest every other year – is to finish up some of the projects I have on my needles. Here’s one that’s been hanging around for a while that is finally done. (Phew.)

The pattern is called Starling Wrap, knit in Rowan Fine Art, and it’s included in the Rowan Fine Art Collection – which was published in 2013. I loved this shawl and bought both the yarn and the book immediately. Rowan Fine Art is a fingering weight yarn, so the book has patterns for socks and shawls. Here’s the Ravelry link for the book, so you can see all of the patterns. I’m not sure how readily available the book is anymore, because the yarn is discontinued.

Here’s the picture from the book of the Starling Wrap. I ordered the same colourway that was used in the sample. And here the perils of online shopping begin to show up. First, for some reason, I thought this colourway (Waxwing) would be reddish or burgundy – in fact, it’s russet, gold and brown. Second, the yarn is also spun hard, which surprised me when it arrived. I was thinking it would be more squishy. Its spin means it’s probably a really good sock yarn for socks. If I had felt it, I probably wouldn’t have bought it for a shawl, and I wouldn’t have chosen this colourway if I’d seen it in real life first. Finally, if I’d flipped through the book before buying it, I would have seen that there were no charts for the lace stitch – just oceans of text instructions. I didn’t cast on until June 2014, according to my Ravelry project page. I made my own chart of the lace stitch and things went reasonably well.

The project then stalled because Rowan chose the Starling Wrap as the free download pattern from the book – I had ordered the book from the UK just for the one pattern – and then they discontinued the yarn, which meant it was half-price everywhere. I was a bit annoyed, which is not conducive to happy knitting.

This yarn is handpainted, btw, but it’s done in a very precise way. (Or maybe it’s precise to each batch or dye lot.) In order to ensure that the variegation worked the same way with each skein, when I got near the end of a skein, I matched the variegation (and its direction) on the next skein by placing the two ends alongside each other.

Last spring, I decided to get it done. The shawl takes three 100g skeins of Rowan Fine Art: I’d knit up two skeins and was well into the third. So, I pulled out the project to just crunch through the rest of it. It’s not TV knitting and it went back in the bag again. Until last week. Out it came. I had started the tenth repeat of the pattern. I was thinking I had to do twelve and use up the yarn to get the length – lo and behold, it was already longer than the pattern specifies. I could have cast off after nine repeats, years ago! LOL So, I finished that repeat and cast it off Saturday. I gave it a good soak and blocked it, and voilà! The endless shawl is done!

It’s enormous, too. I couldn’t take a picture of the whole thing, so this is less than half. And yes, the ends still need to be sewn in. Here’s a detail of the pattern, which is very pretty. The variegation in the yarn made a narrow stripe, which is nice, too.

What do you think?