I'm so close I can taste it..... Sort of

My Evenstar shawl is nearly complete....


hrmmmmm.... Perhaps I should clarify my definition of "complete." I have finished the main body of the shawl and am now working on the border.... the vast, endless border that is the crowing glory of this shawl (I am doing an unbeaded version, so perhaps my "crown" is a little less lustrous than it could be).... I thought the last chart of the shawl was going to kill me. Each row of that final chart was 560 stitches (some over 600) and the chart was 71 rows.... If you do a little math, that equals around 40,000 stitches (I'm rounding). I shouldn't do math, it's bad for my knitting mojo.   As I crept higher up the chart, I could feel the excitement building... perhaps I could actually start one of the kids' back to school sweaters BEFORE they started school next week! or maybe even the cardigan that I've wound the yarn for... or finish a couple of patterns I've been working on.... or a hat.... or a cowl.... or something... something that was NOT what I was working on (which I love BTW. I don't want to give the wrong impression. I get very antsy near the end of a project, the urge to move on to something fresh is somewhat difficult to overcome). I finished row 67 (the last patterned row) and I knew I was close... three garter stitch rows and then only the border would remain. How bad could a border be???? I shouldn't have asked myself because then I started calculating exactly "how" bad it would be. I've knit a few items with attached borders, so I knew how they worked. A pattern of stitches is knit perpendicularly to the body of the item and attached on every right side row to the main body of the item by knitting a live stitch from the body together with the last stitch of the border or edging you are attaching....this means that for every live stitch you must complete two rows of the edging (right side and wrong side).......  This translates very badly for me and my calculations. There are 560 live stitches at the end of that last chart.... 560 stitches that need to be attached to the border. 560 stitches means I will have to complete roughly 1120 rows to complete the shawl... at an average of  18 stitches per row, that equals approximately...... TWENTY THOUSAND more stitches....

nearly complete my ass.