Okay, so I’ve ripped out my first few attempts, starting all over from scratch.

The goal is to create a simple triangle shawl, starting at the center bottom, knitting horizontally in the round, including steeks which will become fringe.

Part of what disappointed me was that I couldn’t decide on what sort of stitch pattern to use, or what sort of sequence to follow for color selection.   So, I decided to sort the colors by “weight”, using a gray-scale image.

This is my starting pile.
going grayscale here helped me with the initial sort, which led to this; sort of okay, but not quite, so I printed the grayscale and went for a third sorting.
Here’s the third sorting, and the grayscale is looking better, but still a couple adjustments to make.
A few more adjustments, and this is what I ended up with.  Still not entirely perfect gradient, but close enough for my purposes.
And here are the four groups or bags of color that I will work with, numbered left to right, 1 through 4.   Group 1 can mix with 3 or 4; group 2 can only mix with 4, group 3 can only mix with 1, and group 4 can mix with 1 or 2.

So, the actual shawl… cast on 20, place marker, cast on 3, place marker, cast on 20 and join into circle making sure not to twist stitches, and place end-of-round marker.  The initial increases will go up from the center 3 working stitches:    K1, [K1, YO, K1], K1.  Do that every other row until you have 11 stitches – 5 on either side of the center stitch.   There will be a 5-stitch border on both sides, separating the main shawl and the fringe.

The actual patterning isn’t set in stone just yet.  I might do simple geometrics, or maybe use some 2-color motifs or something.   I just haven’t decided.

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