This evening I got to the end of 20 rows of nupps. This was billed to me as being about 70 percent of the work on the Swallowtail Shawl, which it most definitely was not, in no small part because those nupps are in a sea of plain stockinette.
So here it is, now large enough that it can't be spread out on the needles I'm using (I guess I could swap out a larger cord, but I can't be bothered for only fifteen more rows of knitting).
I must say that the nupps are not terribly attractive right now. I know they will look substantially better after a nice wash and pin-out, but at the moment they look a little messy.
There are two rows of Lily of the Valley in this shawl, offset from each other. Now I have an edging pattern that is largely yarnovers and the occasional decrease, then a bind-off.
I think I will finish this shawl next week, which is a nice thing. If I'd sat down and worked on it every day this week, I would be done by now, but I would work on one row, then go do something else, then come back. And yet it has still gone every so much more quickly than the budding lace pattern at the beginning.
I'm actually rethinking another shawl pattern because of this. I'd been thinking of doing a shawl that is an all-over pattern much like budding lace, but if that sort of dense, repeating pattern is so easily messed up, then maybe making a substantially larger shawl that has nothing but that sort of pattern in it is not a good call for me. Or I could do it as penance.
I also found nupps to be not as freak-out inducing as I had been led to believe. It all seemed to come down to figuring out my own successful nupp-making procedure.
If you actually like the lily of the valley pattern, Fiddlesticks Knitting has an entire shawl with that pattern (called 'Lily of the Valley', go figure), although the nupps are 7 stitches into 1 instead of 5 into 1. Like your experience, I found the pattern to be easily memorizable and easy what row was up next.
Your shawl is beautiful!