Soothing knitting

I'm attempting the Spanish Dancer shawl from this issue of Knitty, The afghan square for next week has proved to not work, I think I was just knitting even tighter than usual and on a slip stitch pattern that can be a problem so I'm leaving it for now. This shawl is just garter stitch but doing the crocheted provisional cast on and picking up 401 stitches kept me entertained for ages while I watched DVDs of early Red Dwarf!

You may remember that for Christmas 2005 I made several lasagna scarves that end up with an insane number of stitches to cast off, this little beauty ends up with a ruffle of over 3000 stitches, just my sort of thing! I'm not sure if the yarn I'm using will work, it should, and if it does will give me a merino shawl for under £10. It's a great project for hopefully soothing my nerves, also it can be done on a circular needle on the bus so I won't have long pointy sticks that I may be tempted to use as weapons!