Saga of a Shawl

One of my non-internet knitting buddies, loaned me a few of her Knitter's Mags and I decided to put one of the cones of wool crepe I had from Texere on the needles. I started with the notion of working the Stonington but I was neither charged by garter forever (just not a fan, prefer stocking) nor the concentric squares.

Version 1 had me just sort of muddling about with the 1st concentric square continuing while at the same time giving birth to a diamond -- the edges of that diamond would then go from being a variable to a constant in forming a second concentric square. Great idea, not really to be done just on the fly -- I was working the diamonds on both the right and wrong sides -- can you say left slant decrease on right, right on wrong -- mistakes made to order?

Anyhow, everything was working (miracle of miracles) up to row 115 which was the set up for the diamonds that would exist at the decrease and it fell apart -- no way could I force those 5 rows to come out. After a couple days of musing about the problem, running the numbers, recharting, frogging and reknitting, I decided it take me longer to figure it out than to start over again with a bit more foresight (read only work yo's & decreases on one side).

Version 1 will make a teddy bear a very nice _triangular_ shawl some day. For now its fate is to be dressed out to give me some idea of whether my guessitmate of a 20% growth is reasonable and attractive for version 2, which now has 111 stitches on the needles. And, whether based on that 20% growth, I'm still going to have to improvise to get this puppy out to a 28 inch square.