Swallowtail shawl progress is afoot

Look what I'm making - a giant blob of orange gold! This is my Swallowtail Shawl, 14 repeats of the main lace pattern finished. I'm enlarging the shawl so I plan to do 19 repeats as per Pepperknit. This is a semi-secret gift project. Semi because I want to be able to blog about it, but secret because I'm not telling you who it's for. See, semi-secret? Right...

I need to figure out how to make Flickr embed photos in my posts without doing the weird formatting it's doing up there! Anyway, this is Zephyr wool/silk in curry. I think the color in the first photo is pretty accurate. I'm worried it's going to be too orange, but really it is a lovely color and hopefully the recipient will like it. I was going for gold but I couldn't find any gold laceweight in Seattle or on the internets. So, curry it is! I'm very much enjoying knitting this now that I'm into it, although that took a little while. Now the rows are longer and thus the stitches are more stable on the needles so I feel more confident, plus I have the pattern pretty much memorized and I'm learning to read the lace to make sure I'm on track. This has to be done in about a month, which should be okay at my current rate of progress, although the nupps may slow me down. Pepperknit also has a different nupp method that I think I'll borrow to avoid the purl5together stitch, which sounds painful even with the Knit Picks Harmony needles (which are great, and not garish as I initially feared). Here's a close-up of the pattern. Thanks to Dave for stretching it out so I could take the photo!

Now that I'm back and not that busy there's no stopping me - I'm posting all the time! Oh, and I've been messing with my sidebars a bit - if you're a blog I read and I haven't added you yet don't feel bad. My computer at work crashed when I was making the list and I haven't gotten back to it yet. Then again, I read a lot of blogs so I might not be able to list them all...