Interpretive knitting

In the comments earlier this week, Melanie mentioned how nice it would be to see a photo of the Shamrock Shawl "as it grows." To be honest, that never occurred to me! I think maybe because I started it so long ago, and it's always been something that took so long to show any progress. But, since I decided it would be my next project that I would finish, I have been working on it pretty regularly. So today, after I had done some work on it, I decided to see how it would look if I stretched it out a little bit, to take a photo.

Le sigh. The beginning looks pretty good. But the middle part, which I last worked on literally years ago (!), is a mess. The part I've been doing in the past month or so looks OK. But the middle part - not so much looking like shamrocks. More like, um, a sudden lace pattern of an amoeba or something.

I'm not tearing it out and redoing it, though that is really what I should do. But to be honest, I fear that I would end up in a home if I tried to do that. And I keep telling myself that maybe when it's finished, and blocked, it won't look so weird. But I will admit to feeling dismayed with the whole thing at this point. I'm still determined to finish it, and to do my best to make it look as much like it should as possible, but I think I'll end up with a shawl that will be for around the house, or under a coat, rather than one to wear and show off proudly. I am hoping that I can chalk it up to a "learning experience," and try the pattern again sometime, now that I understand better how to read a chart.

I'm sure I can chalk this up to character building and all that. Though to be honest, with all of the "character building" I've done, I really shouldn't have anything left to improve!

In any event, I will probably try to take some pictures of the shawl, and some other things I've wanted to photograph, tonight or tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have some show-and-tell for my next post.