Hello dear readers, I hope you aren’t champing at the bit to see Querido in a brand new sweater, because that’s nowhere close to happening yet.

Last Saturday was an outrageously SPRING day, with the lilacs and ornamental cherries and trees with white flowers and trees with tiny mauve flowers going crazy, and I decided on a whim I was going to turn this

Into a Welted Peerie Shawl.

In one week.

It was an insane plan, I knew, but there was a campus event happening Saturday night, and I didn’t have any purple accessories for my little black dress.

Well, Sunday morning, here’s where I was on the shawl:

That’s not quite half a border.

I did a pretty good job of cutting out sleep, so that wasn’t what slowed me down. I think it was going to work, or perhaps eating, that got in the way. Clearly, I just didn’t prioritize well. The pattern is very easy: incrementally thicker garter stitch lattices sandwiched between bands of garter stitch, followed by tiny garter flowers on a garter stitch field (the pattern says they’re berries, but I don’t see it).

Because the thought of seaming with laceweight yarn sounds awful, I am knitting on the border. Now that I am not knitting in a crazed hurry, it’s very satisfying to see the little strip of liberated fabric hanging off the needle grow.

This Saturday dawned cold and rainy, a warning for the weekend ahead. It would have been perfect weather for sulking, being angry that I lost my bet with myself and had to “accessorize” a black dress with purple nail polish. But I’m only two hours away from the end. I’ve never finished most of a shawl in a week before, and I’m actually pretty proud of that. In two hours, I will have a new shawl and some wiggle room in the stash. There are a few hours left in this chilly Sunday night to hunker down with Melba and knit, so I’m going to pull the shawl back out and liberate the other half from my needles.