Triffid Shawl - Clue 1

This is the first Zen Butterfly Mystery Knit.  A collaboration of Roxanne of Zen Yarn Garden and Meghan Jackson (aka Butterfly Knits).  The design of the shawl was inspired by the classic science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.  How could I resist?  The shawl is knit from the bottom edge up and the first clue was just the cast on, of 477 stitches (for the large size).  And no ordinary cast on.  This was some kind of picot cast on.  The pattern called for using a long tail cast on.  The recommended method to avoid running out of yarn was to work with both ends of the yarn cake.  Yeah.  That worked well.  So next I tried just pulling off a whole lot of yarn, hoping that I had enough that I wouldn't run out of yarn, cause who would want to go through this exercise more than once?  But the picots were fiddly, and I got tired of keeping my strands straight.  I almost gave up at that point and started pondering beads, but then I decided to just try a knitted cast on.  Easy peasy.  No turning the work, no getting confused by which strand was which.

Pattern:  Triffid Shawl by Meghan Jackson
Yarn:  Serenity 20 by Zen Yarn Garden
Needle:  US 7 (4.5 mm) for the cast on