I have made some progress on my Match and Move shawl.  It is very mindless, easy knitting that nonetheless keeps one interested, particularly as the stripes introduce beautiful transitions.

However, there is one big problem.  The shawl has a construction in two parts.  The first part increases on both sides, widening out from the narrow point, and the second part changes up the pattern of increases and decreases to give the shawl its distinctive shape.

© Martina Behm

Martina Behm clearly states in the instructions that you can make the first part as long or as short as you wish, but you must not use up more than one third of each colour of yarn before transitioning to Part 2.  Easy peasy, no?

But what happens when you are knitting in a hotel room on the other side of the globe, and have no scale to weigh your yarn?  And furthermore, the shawl is looking very small to you, even if you are too lazy to transfer it off the needle and make a proper measurement?  Wouldn’t you be tempted to add one more stripe before swiching to Part 2?

The pattern calls for two colours, and each stripe is 48 rows long (or 24 garter ridges).  Because I am knitting with three colours, I made each stripe 32 rows long (or 16 garter ridges). In the original pattern, the pattern switches from Part 1 to Part 2 after the fourth stripe (two of each colour), so I should have switched after the 6th stripe (two of each colour). This would have been after the grey stripe on the bottom of the above photo.  As you can see, I switched after the green stripe (which was the third stripe in green).

I argued with myself that (1) since I started the shawl with green, I should be able to squeeze an extra stripe out of the green despite what the instructions very clearly state, (2) I was probably underestimating the number of grams remaining and should therefore just carry on blithely knitting in the hopes that it all works out in the end, and (3) the designer was probably being overly cautious in her calculations so that if anyone were stupid enough to play yarn chicken (AHEM!) they would still come out okay.

To make matters worse, after I got home and had access to my scale, I continued to delude myself to the fact that I could squeeze out the stripes to finish the pattern, even when the numbers clearly didn’t support this!  Why?  Because (1) I am delusional, and (2) surely numbers lie.

Now, sadly, I have come to the conclusion that numbers don’t lie.  Ripping to commence soon.

I’m packing once again for a long-haul flight.  Tomorrow I’m heading to Johannesburg on a business trip.  I’ll have about 10 nights stuck in a hotel, so I definitely need to have some knitting packed, and preferably more than one project.

I am steadily progressing on my Falkenburg jacket, but it’s not good travel knitting at this stage.  I will take my Highland Rogue along.  Here is the last progress photo I took:

I am further along now, about two thirds of the way through this project.  The ends will be grafted together to make a very substantial cowl which can be wrapped three times around the neck.  I am finding it slow going; in fact, I took it along on my last trip to Johannesburg and possibly the one before that.

I have spent many hours trying to think of another project to take along with me.  I think I may have found one.  Emma and I went through all of my stash last month (more on that in some future post) and I found three skeins of yarn that I purchased long ago to make a Color Affection shawl:

I wrote about this yarn purchase more than seven years ago in this post.  (OMG! I have been writing this blog for a very long time!)  A year later I wrote about the yarn again, stating that my very contrary nature prevented me from knitting the Colour Affection shawl because it was too trendy.  You can find that post here.  I find the latter post to be rather ironic right now, because I am thinking of finally using this yarn to knit another very popular shawl pattern, the Match & Move shawl by Martina Behm:

© Martina Behm

Not only is it popular, but it is also a triangular shawl, a shape which, as I have stated numerous times, I don’t like.  However, it checks the boxes for travel knitting: fairly mindless, acres of garter stitch, and lightweight.  It will provide a good counter to the Highland Rogue.  Maybe I can buck my trend to avoid trendy knits by knitting something trendy (!).  Or perhaps it’s now on the downhill side of the trendiness chart so it no longer qualifies.  In any case, now that I have the knitting sorted out, I’m off to unearth my summer wardrobe.