I'd decided to get the yarn to make a shawl while I was in Iceland, and in an astonishing show of sticking to plan and reducing stress by doing planned things before spontaneous things, I had the yarn bought within six hours of arriving:
The yarn came from a shop called Amma Mús, and it was just a ten-minute walk from my hotel. If you're in the area and need knitting yarn, needlepoint, or embroidery, they're well worth the visit. (And yes I know Isager is a Danish brand.)
The shawl is the Margrét pattern from Icelandic Handknits by Héléne Magnússon. The original shown in the pattern book is black with different shades of grey for contrast colours, but while we were on the bus between Keflavík and the hotel, my friend Kim kept saying I should include the moss green we saw on the lava fields. I think she was right:
The shawl is coming out smaller than prescribed. Since I like the resulting fabric, I'm sticking with the gauge I have and just adding extra repeats of the trellis and ostrich-feather bands. I'm using up yarn at a far slower rate than the pattern expects (for example, it calls for 500m of the second-lightest grey, and even with the extra repeats I'll probably use less than 250m), so no worries there. The extra repeats of the green trellis pattern mean the ostrich feather bands won't line up, but the eyelet "interference pattern" in the centre of the larger band means they don't line up anyhow, so I decided to stop fretting about it.
I'm just hoping to get this knitted and blocked before the heat and humidity of the Toronto summer hits in earnest.