Snail Spirals

I’m making some progress on the sea urchin shawl, finally. I didn’t work on it much at all this past week, but I’ve made it up to round 100 and yesterday I really wanted to see how the pattern was shaping up. When I did a test stretch back at about round 50, I put all the stitches on a string and tried to pin it out. This did not work at all satisfactorily. The string didn’t give enough support, and I couldn’t get a good sense of how it would really look. It was all scallops and wavy edges.

Last night, I got the idea to use my blocking wires. It worked great. And it was SO much easier to transfer the stitches back to the needle from the blocking wires than from a string, where all the stitches had distorted and pulled the string down into the row below.

Anyway, here’s what I have so far.


As always, click to see it bigger. The detail shows up much better in the bigger version.

It’s a bit more than 24” in diameter right now. I didn’t stretch it out as far as I would have if I were actually blocking it because the wires weren’t long enough, though I suppose I could have added a third wire. But I mostly just wanted to see how the pattern was coming out.

Based on this test, I’m definitely going to add to the chart. I’d like this to end up roughly 80” diameter, including a fairly wide border. I’ll probably chart another 100 or so rows.

I must say, I'm quite pleased with it so far!