FO: Seanmháthair

Full disclosure: this final installment of the Spring Shawl Trifecta was intended to be a St. Patrick's Day present for my grandmother, a woman once crowned Irish Mother of the Year in the Quad City area.     I bought the yarn online in mid-February, but it didn't land in my hot little hands until March 21st, when I promptly had a small freakout.

However, the deadline was only in my head, so I'm not going to beat myself up about it, especially since I was project-monogamous for the nine days it took to knit this bad boy. Without further ado...

Ashton Shawlette [Rav link] by Dee O'Keefe; 

knit with approximately 780yds of

 Three Irish Girls Springvale Sock in colorway McNamara

This free pattern is written for a skein of sock yarn, but I had lots and lots of yardage to burn.  My mods were as follows:

• size US8 needles (not US5)
• 7x Chart 2 (not 5x)
• 2x Chart 3 rows 15-24 (not 1x)
• bind off 403 sts (not 319sts)

This shawl blocked to an extremely ginormous size:

The bottom corners of the photo have been digitally altered to remove the mess on my craft room floor... that's right, this blocked diagonally on a queen size bed.  As you can see, I couldn't get it all the way in frame.  In spite of its size, it's super light, so I hope my teeny tiny grandmother will not drown in all this fabric!

The McNamara colorway is sooo gorgeous; it has some really dark teal green and some olive and some emerald and some forest green and there's nothing cooler than watching the tones shift as it gets knit.  Lovely and wonderful.

The shawl bug has hit hard, so I've joined a Ravelry group committed to knitting "12 shawls in 2012" -- three down, nine to go!