An Update to the Knitting Update

So last week, I wrote about what I was knitting, then cheerfully went off to the Thursday night knitting group. After I did some more rounds on the Cereus Cowl, I decided to put it on some waste yarn and try it on; the pattern calls for two repeats of the lace section, but I was thinking I might want to go on for more and make it longer.

Well. It doesn't fit the way I was imagining it would: it isn't wide enough to go over my shoulders as it is, and since it doesn't get wider, going longer would just give me more around my neck instead. Which, I know, it's a cowl, they go around the neck, I get that. I was envisioning more of the effect of Across the Waters I made, which is not a fault of this pattern in the slightest, I'm not saying it is! Not blaming the pattern for it, but it isn't being what I want it to be.

As I see it, I now have three options:

1. Finish it off as the pattern calls for, accepting that it is what it is, not what I imagined it would be.
2. Go on from here, but make it wider (somehow; math would be involved, unfortunately).
3. Rip back to before the lace, and work out making it wider from there.

And I have no idea which I want to do! So what I did do was put it aside for now, and cast on the shawl I mentioned in the post last week, so that I have that to take on the trip instead. Thus:

Reminder that the lace version of this pattern started as:

And, yes, I am considering if I should bring something else on the trip, in addition to the socks and the shawl, because sure, I might finish knitting the shawl (yeah, no, I won't: not 860 yards of yarn), and then what would I do? As far as I can find out, the Big Island doesn't have any yarn stores (though there is a quilting store whose website says they carry yarn).

(Really, the amount of yarn in this shawl, and a sock and a half, will not get done in 10 days, even with travel of this distance. But this is how knitters think.)