Finished: Feather and Fan Shawl

Pattern: Feather and Fan Shawl by Eugen Beuger. Published in A Gathering of Lace
Yarn: Schachenmayr Nomotta Alpaka Fashion
Color: 122
Price: I was lucky that about half of the balls I used were on sale
Amount: 10? about 475 g. I used a tiny bit of the last ball to bind off and one of the balls was not completely 50 g, because I had used some of it for a previous project
Needles: 5 mm
Gauge: -
Dimensions: about 162 cm diameter sorry, after that girl n's comment I checked and it's actually 144 cm
Modifications: I stopped after row 126 and started doing the last edging rows
Comment: I've heard that people knitting the Hemlock Ring Blanket had problems with the feather and fan pattern puckering too much despite blocking (a not so easy task from what I have heard. I got told that someone compared it with fighting with an octopus). My guess was that there are not enough repeats in the round and this causes the puckering (the other variation is that the blanket grows too fast in diameter/length). With this blanket I had zero problems with blocking, just the usual fussing, but there was no excessive use of force needed to whip this thing into shape as other knitters seem to have with the Hemlock Ring, and I also haven't noticed any puckering yet. It's nice and flat without any visible tensions.

I'm counting 8 repeats of the feather and fan pattern in the round for the Hemlock Ring and this pattern has 24 repeats in the round. I haven't looked at the feather and fan pattern version of the Hemlock Ring myself, but from what my friends told me it seems to be knit in a similar as the feather and fan pattern in the shawl. My conclusion is that if I wanted to knit the Hemlock Ring I probably would work in modifications.

The reason I chose the Feather and Fan Shawl was the play of light and dark in the feather and fan pattern (which I'm actually only realizing now as the thought that floated my mind when I saw the shawl the first time was, "I want to knit that one!") and because I liked the flower in the center better. With the flower and the bright color the blanket looks very sunny.

Next time I would choose a thicker yarn though. It's still more like an übersize shawl than a blanket. The yarn is great though. I have a wrap cardigan that my mom made for me in the same yarn and it's really really soft. It's a delight to work with. I have three balls in red which I initially wanted to use for a shawl; now I want to use them for a beret. We'll see.

I washed the blanket in the washing machine (washing programm: wool, cold) with a regular wool wash, because it was too big to wash it in the sink. By the way, I wash most of my wool stuff in the washing machine (cold), even when it's not superwash wool. If I want to give an item a special treatment and when it's not too big I handwash it with Kookaburra, but that's it.