Knitty Couture

As you know, Sandra (a staff member) has been designing a beautiful triangular shawl for our Summer Shawl knit along on May 23rd.

In her words (and pics):

The shawl for the summer knit-a-long is moving along quite nicely.  When I started designing the shawl, the intent was to make a shawl that would be doable as a first lace project and that would also have features that might appeal to more experienced lace knitters.  Hopefully, this is the case. 

I chose to do a triangular shawl.  It starts at the center of the back with very few stitches and then increases out, so that you’re working ever-larger Vs.  Since the shawl starts with relatively few stitches, you can rip back and start from the beginning a few times without losing tons of work. 

After completing the body, I’ll leave the outermost stitches on the needles (the stitches won’t be bound off).  Then I’ll work a lace border, knitting the body edges to the border as I work my way up the sides of the shawl.  I’ve encountered this kind of finishing technique (with the border knitted to the shawl body as it is worked) most frequently in circular shawls.  One of the big advantages of this kind of finishing is that you don’t have to bind off any stitches.  Long bind-offs can be a problem with lace knitting because the bound edge tends not to be very stretchy and therefore won’t block appropriately.

So that’s the basic idea for the shawl construction.  Now what about the lace? 

As you can see from the picture, there’s a lace panel that runs down the center of the shawl.  The pattern for this panel is called “Double Rose-Leaf,” and it is from a lovely old book, Knitting Lace, by Barbara Abbey.  This motif will re-appear as part of the edging.  One has the option of including the center lace panel or knitting the body in pure stockinette.

Yarn: Dream in Color Smooshy
Color: Petal Shower
Yardage: 600yds - 800yds