Sill no quilting but a finished shawl!

Mom and I had our monthly lunch get-together with my cousin yesterday. By Tuesday I  had made so much progress on the shawl that I thought I might be able to get it done by the time I picked her up for lunch. I got the pockets sewn on just before I left the house!

The pattern is by Pamela Barton of Pamela's Adoring Crochet and you can find the YouTube tutorial and links to the printed pattern on the linked page. I'm happy to report that this crochet pattern is accurate!

It looks short here but it's quite long. But it's extra wide and that's what makes it look short. But it's fingertip length.

The yarn that I used is Lion Brand Basic Stitch in Almond Tweed. I ordered 7 skeins and had 2.5 left over. I ordered 1 more than the pattern called for (because that's what I do) but I forgot that I wasn't putting the fringe on so I could have ordered only 5. Usually I try to use my leftover yarn before I move on to a new project but a friend was asking me about this yarn and wanted to get some to make a scarf for herself. I packed it all up and shipped it to her. I can start a new project!

This right here is a lesson in being economical when working in a new ball of yarn. This is the last stitches of the last row and I ran out of yarn! If I had not been so generous with my connecting thread tails (like 20" long) I would not have needed to attach a new ball this close to the end! I was going to have to open the ball anyway to make the pockets but this is just annoying.

I did make a couple of modifications to the pattern. 

The pattern has nice borders of HDC on each side and the center is a repeating pattern of 3 rows: the row with holes and 2 DC rows. So the first row after the first border is a row with holes. I wanted the other end to have the same row of holes so I added one row of the holes and then did the final border. The row I'm pointing to is the extra row of the pattern.

I like symmetry.

The other modification was on the pockets. I added some length. 

This line marks where the pocket was supposed to end but once I got that far I decided I wanted it a bit longer. A normal person would have frogged pack to the DC rows of the pocket and added length there. I didn't want to frog so I just did the last 3 rows one more time to add the length. I finished the pocket with a crab stitch edge to get it a little more stability. This yarn is really stretchy and I felt that the pocket might easily stretch out of shape. The crab stitch (reverse single crochet) should help keep it stable.

I positioned the pockets at the bottom edge of the shawl. I'm really pleased with the way it turned out and Mom likes it. When the weather gets cooler we'll see how it works out for her morning walks.

Until then, I'm jumping into a baby quilt. After all that almond blandness, I'm ready for some bright colors.  I'll also start a wheelchair shawl so that I have a travel/quilt meeting project to work on.

The rest of today is devoted to quilting! I promise to have quilting photos Monday.