Wedding Shawl

I'm knitting a shawl for a friend who's getting married on New Year's Eve.

She's wearing a halter style dress and the ceremony is right before midnight. I think she needs a little something to keep herself warm.

She wants it to be mostly a surprise, so the only direction she gave me was the color. She left everything else up to me -- yarn, fiber, pattern, shape and size.

I stayed up late on Friday to sketch out a design. I had this idea of doing a wedding knot in lace, but it wasn't coming together fast enough. I only have 3 weeks to design and knit this so I had to come up with something else. She's wearing a clean-lined dress without a lot of frills, so I wanted something geometric to keep it from being too sweet.

For my second go-round I went with a diamond motif and a zig zag edging. In the swatch above you can see I tried beading it too. But in this final round I removed the beads. The clear beads were showing up whiter than the yarn, and beading was slowing me down anyway.

I have to admit I'm a bit nervous that the bride will like it. Is it the right shape? Style? Color? Fiber? The one nice thing about a tight deadline is that I can't second guess myself. I have to have faith in my intuition and knit on.

So here I am on Sunday afternoon -- two weeks away from the wedding and I've knit 3 of 20 repeats. If I can get in 2 repeats per day I'll be done before Christmas -- which is my own personal goal. After all, I have Christmas baking and cooking to get to!