This way lies madness

This might be my undoing. It is the Peacock Feather Shawl from Fiddlesticks Knitting. This is my project to work on when Caleb is in bed, the house is quiet, and the TV is off. It is also the reason that my other current project, the black La Gran cardie, doesn't make me go crazy from the boredom of straight stockinette stitch. I fell in love with this pattern the first time I saw it. I knew I had to knit it one day and I had heard (correctly, by the way) that the Fiddlesticks patterns were extremely well written and charted. So I decided to do it. My mom is also knitting one and we started together. After the first week, I had a nightmare where I kept finding dead peacocks all over the place, so I took a break for a couple of weeks. Mom kept going and is almost done with her's. She also scanned the pattern into her computer, reversed it and printed it out, which makes knitting the second half SO MUCH EASIER! You see, only the first half of the pattern is charted, for the second half, you just reverse everything: K2tog becomes sl1, K1, psso; you read from left to right, you get the picture. In theory, its not too hard to read a chart backwards, and the first part of the pattern is pretty easy to flip around. By the time you get to the medium sized feathers though, you get a headache after you've knitted 4 rows, you're eye is twitching uncontrollably, and you start having dreams of dead peacocks. Now, with the flipped version of the chart, its going much faster, I'm not talking to myself (as much) and I haven't dreamed of dead birds lately. These are all good things. Want to know the really sick part? I found a picture of this. No one in their right mind would do this twice, but wouldn't it be spectacular in white?