Magickal Earth

or rather the shawl that's going to take a really, really long time.

This is the edging. I have done 18 of the required 48 repeats of the edging pattern. For anyone math-impaired, that's just over 1/3 of the edging done. It's a giant pain in the bum. Out of all the shawls I've done, my least favorite part has always been the edging. Usually, the edging is done last, after the body of the shawl. Edging is actually quite deceptive because it looks so small, yet it is usually a pretty good portion of the shawl itself because of the way it's done. Therefore, you think you're almost finished with a shawl when in reality you still have tons of edging left.

On the Magickal Earth Shawl, however, the edging is done differently. It still makes up a good portion of the shawl, BUT it's done first. So, you get the horrible edging out of the way. Doing it this way certainly has its disadvantages, the main one being the ungodly number of stitches you have to pick up along the edging for the body of the shawl (if I've figured right, it will be over 1,000). BUT, again, the horrible edging will be done, out of the way, finished. A distinct advantage to doing the shawl this way is that since the shawl is a square, the shawl is worked inwardly toward the center. Yep, that means that it gets smaller and smaller as it's worked. So, yes, I have to pick up way too many stitches, but once it's done, I won't have the edging to do last. It will get bigger faster and faster.

Hopefully, it won't take forever to get the edging done in the first place.