It's my first clothing item that isn't either a rectangle or a sock! I worked on this pretty much exclusively (which is pretty rare, I'm usually doing multiple projects at once) for the first couple weeks of December.
I started with the basic construction of a Stahman Faroese shawl, but instead of lace I stuck cables all over it. The neck band is a simple little 4 stitch wide cable, then that follows all the way down both sides and eventually across the bottom of the finished shawl. There were a couple stitches worth of reverse stockinette on either side of the cable, the "outside" side was whipstitched down so the rope is the very outside edge of the finished product.
A little futzing in Excel and I came up with a chart for the dimensions and where the increases would go, and then I sketched cables. Lots and lots of cables. That part was incredibly fun, something about figuring out how to get them to fit where I wanted really appealed to my geeky little self. Once I had that all figured out I just followed the chart that I made. I did the chart backwards on one of the sides so that the cables mirror each other from the right to the left.
When I was starting this I decided to figure out the "cabling with a cable needle" thing. I am very glad that I did! That made this go a lot faster. I also completely fell in love with cables while knitting this. I like the way they look, I like knitting them, I like figuring them out and creating them from knotwork... they just plain old make me happy!
I used Cascade 220 in colorway #9456 which is a pretty heathery blue, and a size 8 circular needle. This used about 5 and a half skeins.
