I have pi... do you?

So I just completed my very first pi shawl. EZ was not kidding when she said it was simple. I wish she was kidding when she said that I, as a woman, was unlikely to know pi. I know it was written a long time ago, but underestimating women as a whole just gives me a shiver, and not in a good way at all.

Having finished a simple piece, I can say with relative confidence that the pi is a good model to tack various lace patterns into, and it would make a myriad of shawl possibilities. There's just the one drawback in my opinion: It took three freaking hours to bind off. Just that one row, three hours. Eek!

Beyond that, the whole thing was quite simple. I wouldn't recommend using the shawl as its own bag, as EZ suggests, but that may be because I was using nice yarn that I didn't want to mistreat the way I do my knitting project bags. Of course, I also didn't take it out of my house after the first lace pattern was finished, because it gets far too big to cart around to public spots.

So without further ado, here's the progression from yarn vomit to blocking shawl:

The first pattern:

Halfway through the second pattern. I stopped bothering to take pictures after this, because it pretty much looked the same until binding off.

And finally, the blocking finished piece:

First of all, yes, I am circle-impaired. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it to block into a perfect circle. Also, I am filled with the lazy, so by the time it looked like this, I figured it was good enough. And when I wear it, it looks gorgeous. Or at least, so say the lovely ladies at my LYS, who are not at all biased to say that a piece of knitted lace looks good.... right? I should probably reblock it sometime to get the wave pattern on the edge instead of points, but I'm overall quite happy with how it looks now. (And yes, that is a hideous acrylic blanket crocheted in the seventies in the corner of that picture, it belongs to the cat.)

The tiny bit of variegation in the Handmaiden Amethyst didn't interfere with the pattern at all, the lace patterns that the pattern's creator used are incredibly simple to memorize, and I fully intend to make one or more of the other pi shawl patterns they created. I'm sure I won't be able to afford more handmaiden to do it, but I don't doubt that they'll look lovely in less expensive yarn.