I wrote yesterday about how I had failed to finish my Color Affection shawl in time to qualify for the Ravellenic Games. What I failed to mention was that the knitting I did during the Olympic Games was not without its fruits.

Last year I began a Lace Rims shawl for Mum’s Christmas present, but I ran out of time before I ran out of yarn, which meant that she received a three-quarters-finished shawl under the tree. I brought it back home with me intending to finish it quickly. We all know how these things go, and, while I knit a row or two on it sometime over the winter, basically I let it sit in favor of new projects.

Fast forward to the first week of the Olympics. Color Affection had run into some issues and I thought I needed a 4.5mm needle to fix one of them. The only needle I had in that size was holding Lace Rims, and I thought it made the most sense to polish it off before I got to work on my own shawl.

First, there was the mishap of figuring out where I was in the pattern. Forgetting each row ends with an additional knit stitch caused a few hiccups, resulting in some ripping.

The yarn is Wolle’s Yarn Creations Color Changing Cotton 6-Ply (in, I believe, Misty Lagoon). It consists of six unplied strands of cotton that change from light to medium to dark over the course of 320 yards. Only one strand changes at a time, but when it does, it’s knotted to the next color.

I knew I was short on yarn and that I did not have quite enough to complete the pattern repeats as written. However, when I reached the end of the last full repeat I knew I could fit in before the border, one strand was still in the medium green, and I still had a bunch of yarn left.

I really wanted the border to be all one color.

So I did what any dedicated knitter would have done. I unwound the remaining yarn in the ball, measured off the yardage the pattern said I needed for the border, and looked at what I had left. There was still quite a bit of yarn left — enough, I thought, for two more rows, which would get me past the final knot and into the dark green on all six strands.

You can already see where this is going, right?

This was not my first knitting project, so I could see the potential for disaster, too, and so I decided to hedge my bet by putting in a lifeline (essentially, a long piece of yarn run through a row of stitches, particularly in lace work) before those two final rows.

Thank goodness I did, because this is how close I got to the end of the bind-off before I ran out of yarn:

So, back I ripped to the lifeline. I put it back on a (smaller) needle and began the bind-off from there (eight rows shorter than the pattern calls for).

Let me pause here to mention again that this yarn is unplied. When knitting with it, it was fine. Occasionally I’d bisect the strands instead of going through the stitch, but really not a significant amount more than when normal.

Crocheting with the yarn, however, is another ballgame entirely, particularly when I reached the part in each scallop where you had to pull the stitch through four loops at once. Not fun. Not an enjoyable process.

But eventually I did succeed:

A completed shawlette:

It does look pretty, particularly with the beads in the border. I opted for two colors, a dark green that matched the yarn at the end of the skein and a lighter, sparkly one that matched the beginning of the skein.

The shawl qualified for the Ravellenic Games knitalong in the WIPs (works in progress) wrestling category.

But, more importantly, Mum finally got her Christmas present back:

(Thanks to Mum, who took several of these photos for me and emailed them this afternoon, when I realized I didn’t have any of the shawl as a whole.)