It's the process...

Designing a shawl is a many step process.  I'm going to be speaking at my local knitting guild in the fall about how I've been learning to be a designer and so I've been thinking a lot about the steps.

Not all the photos come out exactly as I expect.

Mayil is my most recent shawl and it started out as being the "wings" (the two triangular sides) of a center panel shawl that I spent weeks working on, and ended up shelving because it wasn't coming out the way that I wanted.  The center panel and the wings, just didn't work together when I started knitting it so I decided to let it go for a while.

But then I got some yarn for my birthday which I thought would look great with the wing pattern, so I pulled it out, revised it some more and Mayil was born.

It took about four weeks for me to get it knitted in between all my family and part time work responsibilities. Then another week or two to write up the pattern and get pictures taken.  And then I sent it to a tech editor who was swamped and took a couple of weeks to get to finding my typos.

Small errors, but I'm glad to have a second pair of eyes to look at it all!

Now it's being test knit by the amazing volunteers on Ravelry who have until the end of April to finish.  The final step will be to release the pattern on Ravelry.  And wait.  Wondering.  Will anyone buy it?