Warlock Virus Shawl

My friend Edel is currently battling breast cancer.  While her prognosis is great, and it was caught early, I'm still worried about her, and wish I could be there to give her a hug.  Since I can't, I decided to whip up a shawl to hug her for me. 

The pattern is the same Virus Shawl, that I made for myself a few months ago.  There is no written pattern for this one, but there is a chart and lots of Youtube videos to get you started.  Once you do the repeat of the same 4 rows a few times, you can coast along on autopilot and ignore the chart. 

The yarn is Lion Brand Mandala, in the colorway Warlock, and was $4.97 a cake at Walmart.  I wish I had gotten a better picture that more accurately shows off the colors in natural light, but I was in a rush to get it shipped to her before Jim & I left for Christmas.  The yarn is listed as a 3 weight, but I'd swear I've used 4's that are the same thickness.  (It's definitely thicker than Lion Brand's Shawl-in-a-Ball, which is listed as a 4.)  It's 100% acrylic, and not as soft as sCaron Simply Soft, but it was not scratchy on my hands as I worked. I liked using this slightly thicker yarn, since the project worked up so fast.  I actually managed to finish it in just 1 week!

More about the yarn: It's a beautiful set of colors, but they don't blend into one another gradually.  They just jump from 1 color to the next.  I had read that in an online review, so I bought 2 skeins, afraid that the jumps would be in lousy places when I was working, and that I might want some room to spare.  I'm really glad I did that.  (Especially at $4.97 a piece, they were a good deal.)  I unwound the first part of my the cake, which was a deep purple, because I wanted to start with the creamy tan color. 

I got the first 5 repeats out of the tan and taupe, and could tell the color would jump in the middle of the next row, so I cut out the remaining taupe and moved on to the next color, mustard.  I did the same thing again with the green and teal, and when I was working I could tell that I would run out of the first skeins total length of teal before I would be done as much as I wanted to do, so I jumped over to the second skein (which just happened to start with teal), and continued.  I ended up doing the same with the deep brown, rust, deep purple and light purple, jumping back and forth between skeins to get enough yarn of each color. 

When I was running out of yarn in light purple, I switched back to the creamy tan, and did a row of single crochet around the whole thing, to give it a finished look.  I would have liked to do another whole round of the repeat in tan, but I would have needed another 1-2 cakes to get that much tan, and would have had all the rest leftover.  As it is, I have a quart ziplock bag full of mini balls of the remaining bits of color!  It measures 30" from the center back, down to the point; 60" across the top; and 42" along each side.