I had so many things big plans last week – things to finish knitting, things to start knitting, things to share with you – and then the week started off this way:
Portico, in progress
That, my friends, is me running out of yarn with about 6 inches of bind-off left on a shawl I had finally almost finished after letting hibernate for two years.
This was the Through the Loops Mystery Shawl of 2012, and I set it aside in July of that year when I got involved knitting other things (which were almost all Through the Loops designs, so I was monogamous, in a way). I wanted to knit this year’s Mystery Shawl, but decided to make myself finish that one first. It was going great!
love that blue
This is such a great knit, and such a dreamy yarn (Jade Sapphire Silk/Cashmere 2-ply). LOVE it. When I picked the shawl up, I was, of course, surprised to see that there wasn’t really that much left to do. But as I knit, I realized one of the reasons I set it aside in the first place – I was almost certainly not going to have enough yarn. No idea why I ordered one skein of 400 yard yarn, when the pattern calls for 450 yards. And I can’t find more of this color (Curacao) anyway – I think I got it on closeout. At any rate, I stopped the final part of the pattern a few rows ahead of where it was supposed to end, even tinking back an entire row of lace to make sure I had enough yarn to finish up.
Last Sunday night, during Game of Thrones, I did the bind-off, until there was no more yarn.
Right now, the idea of undoing the bind-off and ripping back a bit is more than I can stomach. I’m going to weave in what few ends there are (I think there are three) and see if I can splice together enough yarn from what’s left after that to complete the bind-off. Otherwise, I have no idea what I’ll do.
It was disappointing enough that I actually went two whole days before doing any more knitting, which is kind of unheard of for me. Well, it wasn’t only disappointment and discouragement, my week also became blindingly busy and there was just no time or energy for any knitting (and certainly not for any spinning).
The remedy, of course is a new project:
Through the Loops Mystery Shawl Knitalong 2014
More about that later.
Ah! But the giveaway! Thank you all SO MUCH for your wonderful comments on my last post, and thank you for taking the time to pass on this important information to people. Between the comments on the post and the people who shared and let me know on Facebook, there were 67 entries into the giveaway (I made sure not to double count people who commented both on my blog and on Facebook). I plugged the number into the Random Number Generator and got:
#17 – Susan Michaud, who wrote: “I pinned it to my Kids board on Pinterest. As a grandmother of 8, this is good to know!” Thanks, Susan! I’ll be in touch!
Thank you again, to all of you, for your kind comments – and for your warm wishes for my kiddos for their birthday!
earthchicknits 
Could you match the color with embroidery thread? Then you could bind off that last bit with it.
Do you have a local knitting friend who would frog the cast off and last row for you? I had one shawl where I did have to do the cast off in a different colour, but the yarn was a fuzzy mohair and the cast off was fairly well hidden. The other thing, maybe you can do an unknitted cast off, where you’re just taking each loop through the next, starting at the end opposite the yarn tail (so you can secure the last loop). The only problem with this is that it doesn’t have a ton of stretch so might be an issue with blocking. It’d probably work better to unpick the last row to knit it larger and then do the loop-through-loop, but if you’re going to unpick a row, might as well just do the knitted cast off 🙂
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