The finally refers to the crochet itself. The almost refers to the fact that I still need to weave in six ends.

I have no picture of it at the moment because I didn’t finish it until well after the sun had gone down, and while a Ninja’s natural habitat might be the night, the same is not true of shawls.

So what is left to do is weave in the ends, lightly block the piece, and find the most fantastic shawl pin on the planet to coordinate with the yarn.

This shawl was a challenge because of the yarn I chose to make it with: Lion Brand Homespun Yarn. I used the pattern for the Serene Comfort Shawl provided at the lionbrandyarn.com website.

On the upside, the yarn is very soft, works up pretty quickly (more on this later), and has a lovely drape to it. On the downside the yarn is textured and the hook sometimes catches on the yarn, and because of the texture and the color, it can be difficult to see your errors until you are much further past them than is useful.

Despite these drawbacks, however, I find that the yarn is well worth using for shawls, and if I am ever feeling super intrepid, I just might try to make a swing jacket with this yarn.

But back to this particular shawl. It is made from three skeins of yarn, the first and third of which I crocheted relatively quickly and with few errors. The second skein however, provided me with sufficient challenge that it took a week of picking it up, crocheting it, putting it back down, and picking it up again only to find a visible-even-to-the-inexperienced-eye kind of error anywhere from 3 to five rows back, at which point I would unravel the piece until I had gotten the offending stitch out.

The middle skein left me with the feeling that for every three stitches I managed to move forward, I would have to move four stitches back. Despite this, I finally did finish crocheting the second skein and moved onto the third, which I finished this evening.

If I had it to do over, I would have started with a wedge-cut hook in either aluminum or plastic, but preferably plastic. What I learned as I tried every hook in my bag of tricks is that the Homespun Yarn seemed easiest to use with a wedge-cut hook, and that ease of use was improved further if said hook were made of plastic.