The Small Shawl

I finished knitting on the small shawl in autumnal colors.




The finished fabric has a very nice drape, and a pleasant almost springyness to it - I think partly due to the mesh section and partly due to the character of the yarn. For whatever reason, I love the way it feels over my shoulders. The base yarn that the dyer used is a superwash merino, 3 ply, smooth with a firm twist - reminds me of Koigu or Louet Gems. This is a lousy picture, but it does give an idea of how the fabric falls into nice folds.



The top edge rolls to the outside, which might bug the heck out of some people, but doesn't bother me. I'm mulling over some ways to mitigate this tendency, though, just as a design challenge.

The whole thing used a little less than one skein of "Calypso" from Creatively Dyed Yarn (color: Gin) - so somewhere in the area of 480 yds. I knit it on 3.00 mm/ US #2 Addi lace needles for a gauge after blocking of 15 sts = 4 ". (I'm a loose knitter, so I expect many would use a US 4 for this gauge with this yarn).

The stitch patterns work very well with the variegated yarn, I think for reasons that Tracy mentioned in her comment on an earlier post: there are sections of smooth stockinette that show off the color play, and the small repeat mesh section that mixes the colors up. The overall arrangement is simple/bold enough to stand up to the color changes. I don't think this would look particularly well in yarn that forms definite stripes, whether wide or narrow. Because the shawl is worked from the bottom point up with increases at each side, that type of color arrangement would form horizontal color bands that would fight (rather strenuously, I think) with the stitch patterns.

Autumnal

Last spring I purchased a skein of of fingering weight from Creatively Dyed Yarn. It intrigued me because the colors are sort of "edgy" and the color repeats irregular. It's exactly the kind of coloring that wouldn't work for a lot a lace patterns. I decided that I wanted it to be a triangle scarf or small shawl for fall, and, perversely, I wanted it to have some lace elements to it.




So far, the yarn is cooperating in a way that I like. And so far, I like the design well enough to want to write it up properly. The problem I'm running into as the piece gets wider is this: the chart will be really big, too big to print out the full width on a single page. The pattern isn't complex, it just takes up a lot of room to chart out. So now I'm trying to figure out the most reasonable/comprehensible way to break it down.