Lichen Knitted Shawl – Finished!

I found a lovely shawl on Ravelry last month that was ruffley with interesting shaping that I had to make.

Lichen by Larissa Brown turned out an easy, magical knit. Perfect if you are new to knitting lace! It uses a thicker yarn than usual, an Aran weight (though DK version is available). The pattern is written out, and is simply knit, purls and yarnovers – nothing crazy.

I wanted to start this shawl so bad, but I had no blockable yarn in that amount. I decided to give Elann a try and ordered a couple balls of their Peruvian Highland Wool. This yarn is a heathered gray (colorway 1068) – I love the flickers of blue and purple off the gray base!

Starting the shawl I had mixed up the slip edging directions, so I had to frog and start over – but once I got the hang of the pattern, it was very easy of a knit to require not too much attention, but enough things going on to keep it interesting.

2 weeks of knitting while watching movies or listening to podcasts, I had a finished shawl! This puppy finishes very quickly – I’m sure if I worked on it more, it could of been done in a week or less.

I had also added 3 extra repeats as it turned out I had extra yarn, despite the yardage that was suggested in the pattern. Before blocking I got the length to 51″.

Despite the pattern being pretty easy, block WAS NOT EASY.

All the other shawls I’ve done were a “U”, rectangle or triangle shape, so pinning wasn’t too bad for those – this Lichen shawl was on a different level of crazyness! You have to pin open the ruffles, so the shawl bends into a spiral, requiring you to pin ontop of your existing work.

What helped me with blocking this shawl: (taken from my Lichen Ravelry project page)

1. Have lots of pins – I used 211 and probably could of used more so I didn’t have pointy ruffle bits.
2. Start pinning the tip of the shawl in the middle of your blocking mat.
3. Pin the first ruffle to a basic shape, but don’t go overboard on pins
4. Roughly pin the next ruffle
5. Redo the first initial ruffle, with max pins. I found once you got to the second ruffle, it created slack, thus having to repin the first one no matter what.
6. When the shawl starts to spiral in itself, thus you have to pin ontop – it is really easy to mix up what pins go where. Either change pin colours – or when in doubt, just add another pin without removing any old pins.

After all that – over 45 minutes of pinning and sore, soggy pruney fingers from the wet yarn. This shawl also took awhile to dry too since it was layered on its self.

Kind of looks like a ninja star, doesn’t it?

Unpinning was easier, but again, over 200 pins hurts the thumbs after awhile plus accidental pin stabs!

The result? WOW! The shawl stretched out to over 60″ (and hard to measure because of the ruffles).

Love the colour of the yarn!

I had some spikey ends on the ruffles, but some smoothing helped a little. Next time, MORE pins!

I love how the shawl turned out! This one is supposed to be for me, though if I were to make it again for myself, I would add maybe 2 rows to the ruffles to make it wider.

Bonus: Benson thinks 100% wool is tasty to lick. I had to pry him off the shawl, so no bunny knitware modelling for him!