Shed Leaves: A Large Fall Leaf

In the fall trees shed leaves. Their bright colors and stemmy ends clutter the walk to the train and float down to get fixed in my hair when I'm not looking.

At Chez Hedgehog, I'm attempting to shed unfinished objects. Looking back through the past couple of months of posts I see I haven't kept you up to date on the things that have fallen off the needles. I'll note, none of these things have been properly blocked nor ends woven in but with the needles reclaimed, I'm calling them done enough for now.  Here's the first of what I've found piled up.

I did finally finish the Phoenix Fall Tree Color Affection (Affliction).  I ended up using around 1100 yards and I needed at least 150 more.



This was knit, for those just tuning in, out of three skeins of Colinette and one skein of Louet Gems. The Gems was the closest that I could find in a chocolate brown.

I modified the pattern in that I started with the brown and introduced the green in the first section. I did not carry the brown into the second section, but moved on to the green with the mottled orange. Then, for the third section I did green, mottled orange, and orange.

I wanted a deeper shawl than the pattern described and followed someone's directions to only do two stitches before the wrap and turn in the third section.  While this should have made a deeper shawl, it also ate up a ton more yarn, far extended how long the project took, and meant that I was starting to drive myself stir crazy. Also, the shawl isn't that much deeper.

That picture above is wrong side out, which is actually how I plan to wear it.  I wanted something that looked like a fall tree, something that blended smoothly from color to color.  As you can see below, the harsher stripes of the pattern's right side, did not blend.



As you can see a little more clearly, I gave up the green a couple of inches from the bottom. I wasn't through the third section yet, but I didn't have much green yarn left and I was hoping to do a little something with the leftovers.  That hope will go unrealized--I ran out of the mottled orange yarn entirely (again, before I formally finished the third section) and I knit with the plain orange until I was nearly out of yarn before binding off with Jenny's surprisingly stretchy bindoff.  While this is very stretchy, it's also a yarn pig and those rows were NOT short, so that took a lot of yarn.

There was a little bit of orange yarn left, perhaps 10 yards? Pyewacket got to it though and such you'll not get to see it again.

Here's a close up of the side I was picking up from with the wrap and turn. You can see at the bottom where it should have been much deeper....



And here's the whole thing pre-blocking



There's a wedding I'm hoping to wear it to in North Carolina in a couple of weeks, which means I need to wear in all the ends and get it laid out on something to block. Oh, and lay towels on top so that Pye and Gypsy don't help themselves to the freshly washed shawl.

Though when I first started this shawl, I had a lot of hope for using the pattern multiple times to use up some of the fingering weight yarn that's taking up space and isn't really appropriate for socks. By the time I finished this, though I really wasn't enamoured of it. The pattern itself is fine, it's clearly written, I had no trouble following the directions. I just am not as thrilled with the end product as I'd hoped.  Maybe once I'm a little further removed from the knitting of it....