FO ... Monday?

Good morning! I had hoped to have an FO Friday post last week, but this past weekend was commencement at the university where I work (both for 2022 and a make-up ceremony for 2020), so work got a wee bit chaotic toward the end of the week to ensure everything was ready. Instead, I'm debuting this beast of a shawl today.

Pattern: Hitchhiker by Martina Behm (Ravelry link)
Yarn: Handspun from various Southern Cross Fibre club shipments, totaling 392 g/1,320 yds. (leftovers from my handspun Shifty pullover)
Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm)
Started/Completed: April 4/April 30
Mods: Kept knitting until I had 60 teeth

This shawl is not yet blocked, so I don't yet have final measurements, but surely the photo above will illustrate quite well that it's significantly bigger than my wingspan. I kept knitting until I reached the end of a repeat and didn't have enough yarn left for another, so I still have a small amount of yarn remaining but really not enough to do anything significant with. And I'm simply delighted with how this ended up. It is quite large, but the beauty of this shawl pattern is that even as it gets really long, it never gets terribly deep at the center, so for as big as this is, I can still wear it comfortably like this:

I didn't do anything really fancy with blending the colors other than to alternate every two rows/every garter ridge as I finished one color and started with the next, working that blending mainly so I would have a hard line where one color stopped and the next one picked up. Of the six colors, I have the most of the final one leftover, and I played some serious yarn chicken with several!

It's hard to get a sense of scale here, but I can tell you that all these scraps fit into the palm of my hand, so I really did do a pretty decent job of using up almost all the yarn that was left from the sweater. And I have to say that for as much as a garter stitch project can get monotonous, I really loved working on it. It was such a joy to have a project that didn't require much thought and that was so forgiving -- I have no idea how many stitches I had on the needles at the end, and that number really didn't matter in any case. I can see now why Bonny always has one on the go, and I can also see myself knitting more of them in the near future (Rainbow, in fact, has already asked for one!).

My one frustration with this project has been getting a camera to accurately capture the colors. This photo probably comes closest, though:

If you haven't yet knit a Hitchhiker, I'm here to recommend that you do, especially if you need some soothing knitting! I expect I will be knitting many more or them (or variations on the pattern) in the years to come.