Lace shawl in progress

Some pictures of Birch underway. I love working with this project. It is working up into a frothy cloud of soft, warm lace, and I am really enjoying holding it in my hands. The beauty of making a triangular shawl, is that it gets smaller and smaller as you are working, and therefore each row is faster to knit than the previous!

The version I am making is the garter stitch version. It is not so easy to see this in the pictures, but I thought the stockinette version looked too smooth. The garter stitch looks warmer, and a little fuzzier, more cozy.

It took a while to get going, because when you first cast on, you can't see the pattern, and you are forced to keep counting to make sure you are on the right track. Kind of difficult when you have 299 stitches on your needle. I was doing the first pattern row on a three hour plane ride, and the flight attendant was very interested, and would check in with me every time she passed by, but she was never able to see any progress, as I kept counting and going back again and again. The perils of starting on a project in public, you won't impress anybody :)

The pattern calls for yfwd, but I am just translating that as a regular yarn-over. Also, it calls for K2tog tbl, but it is much easier to just use s1 k1 psso. The look is the same.