Yes. And no.

I've finished the Traveling Woman shawl knitted in Treisur Infatuation.



The blocked shawl measures about 56" by 18" (that's three repeats of Chart A, one of Chart B):



The ends haven't been woven, and they won't be. Yes, it's done. But no--I'm not keeping it. I'm frogging this--for a few reasons.

I'm a better knitter than this. (I hope.) My tension is a bit goofy in several places and is a lot goofy in a couple of places. Often, tension problems correct themselves in blocking; the problems got less noticeable, but they didn't completely vanish (and a solid-colored laceweight yarn used for a lot of loose stockinette stitches only emphasizes the problem). I also had to fudge a couple of places where my stitch count got off (and it was me, not the pattern). And I actually dropped a stitch once. It didn't ravel (thanks to the lifeline), but when I pulled out the lifelines, there that stitch was, just sitting there, doing nothing, when it should have been anchoring the stitch in the next row (where I probably fudged a stitch to compensate). None of the fudging or dropped stitches would have been deal-breakers under other circumstances, but on this shawl it's just too much.

You see, I like the pattern. And I like the yarn. And I want to like each of them in a finished project--and this project isn't filling the bill.

When the yarn arrived, I was thinking of it as a sock yarn, which usually is a fingering weight. In fact, this yarn is billed as laceweight. The Traveling Woman pattern, though, calls for fingering weight. Although several Ravelers have knitted the shawl in laceweight, those weren't the shawls I liked the most. The ones I really liked were the ones where the solid areas of the pattern looked more dense. (The shawl pictured on the pattern's web site is a perfect example.) If I'd been paying proper attention to the yarn, I'd have realized that Traveling Woman was not the pattern to show a laceweight yarn off well. (And using solid-colored laceweight yarn just made my stitches look worse than necessary in the denser areas of the shawl.)

So I made a bad choice in combining this yarn with this pattern, and they both deserve a better result.

I'll try the Traveling Woman shawl again. I've got a Knit Picks Stroll Multi that I think will work well. It's fingering weight.



And I'll find a pattern suitable for a laceweight yarn--perhaps the Branching Out scarf.

I like knitting, I like this yarn, and I like this pattern. I just want to like them all when I'm finished.

For now, I'll conduct an experiment on this new yarn that SWTC sent to me to try out: let's see how responsive it is to frogging. Will it ravel easily? Will it show "damage" or will it look good?

Stay tuned...

Edited to add: The shawl is being spared. A friend wants it, flaws and all. I'll reblock it (the points on the lower edge didn't hold on the first blocking) and send it off to Ali in Ireland.

And I'm going to knit some laceweight bookmarks with the remaining Infatuation.