The first shawl began as a triangle, and ended as a (garter stitch) square shawl. In essence, all you’re doing is altering the rate and placement of the increases, but the results can be quite interesting.

Other variations are possible by eliminating certain increases, while continuing others. You can create a shallow triangle shawl by stopping increasing in the centre, but continuing at the sides. You could also reverse this, and begin by increasing only at the sides, and add the central increases later. I think this would create more of a point.

If you start off with the circular shawl and switch to the triangular shape, you’ll end up with a shawl bearing some similarity to a Faroese shawl. For the shawl below I actually didn’t continue the increases down the middle, so it’s not quite a triangle.

The diagrams showing the increase paths will help you in visualising your shawl mutations, but experimentation’s the ticket. I hope this brief post has given you some ideas. I’ll continue to post about shawl design and knitting, and hope that you aren’t yet resilient to the new strains! ;)

If you’d like to listen to me ramble at the lovely Lara Neel (a.k.a. Math4Knitters) while you knit, do please listen to the interview here. I’d never done an interview over Skype before, so I was very excited! You can also grab a discount code to get 20% off any Laylock pattern until the end of August. Just enter it in the Ravelry cart. Hurrah!

* Please forgive the wonky blocking & hurried photos! So many things going on chez Laylock at the moment: autumn designs, novel writing, travel, interviews, plans for world domination, the lot!

Have you read?

1. Crescent-Shaped Shawls
2. Easy Shawl Borders
3. Free Shawl Knitting Cheat Sheet

Shawls that you can knit until you run out of yarn are the bread-and-butter of knitting, to me. I know there are knitters who can’t stand the tedium of plain knitting, but I love the opportunity to think, listen to the radio, watch a film, or even read, while my hands are busy and productive.

This 1-page cheat sheet provides the shaping formulas, and row-by-row instructions for knitting 5 such shawls: square, circular, triangular, semi-circular, and heart-shaped. All you need is some yarn, a pair of needles, and some stitch markers. If you’re stuck on a desert island, you can improvise with plant filaments, some smooth sticks (sharpened to a point), and a few seashells with holes in them. You’ll need the instructions though, so click here & print them out now, and tuck them away safely in your pocket!

These shawls grow outwards from the neck, and are bound off around their circumference. This means that you can start knitting without any plan, and decide at the end whether or not you want to add a border in a different stitch pattern. Or you can just add a fringe. Once you get the basic idea, other modifications are very easy to make too: coloured stripes, textured stripes, different stitches, m1s instead of yos, etc. You can knit the shawls with any yarn from lace-weight to bulky. If you’re working in garter stitch, I recommend going up a needle size or two, to get a fabric that drapes nicely. The most important thing is that you like the way it feels.

I should note that the square, circle and semi-circle shawls will not be perfect in shape, but they can be blocked to be this way. For a (pretty much) perfect square or circle, it would be best to work in the round. And for a less semi-hexagonal semi-circle, distribute your increases across the row in a less linear fashion (like Citron, for example). Nevertheless, the former two shapes provide nice shawls that will stay on your shoulders, unlike the variations knit in the round, which need to be folded.

Need I mention that these make great summer knitting projects, when it’s too hot to think? Please knit them in the brightest, most brilliant & beautiful colours of yarn you can find. Thank you.

Translations

Edna of Tricô Sem Costura has kindly translated the PDF into Portugese.

PORTUGESE ERRATA (10/11/11):

Circular:
CARR. 9: 1M, laç ✽meia
até o marcador, laç,
passe o marcador, 1M,
laç, rep. a partir de ✽
mais duas vezes, meia até o último
ponto, laç, 1M.

Have you read?

1. Easy Shawl Borders
2. Beeton Counterpane Shawl
3. Dovetail Shawl

PARASOL SHAWLETTE – £3

Variations are surely one of the most entertaining & educational artistic practices of all time. When you’re familiar with your piece, and have already done the hard graft of choosing your theme, you’re free to play & tinker, and indulge. My attempts are humble, but here is what a master composer can do with a simple tune (perhaps the simplest tune?). Listen while you read on…

Have you noticed that shallow shawls* seem to be all the rage in the knitting world recently? I simply couldn’t resist. The Parasol Shawlette is a variation of the Parasol Stole: narrower, and with a single border for the ribbing section. The central section, instead of being straight, makes a gentle curve, with the ribbing flowing easily in & out of the decrease “bells”. I have to admit, there are several aspects of this variation that I find particularly satisfying:

• The asymmetry is a natural result of the repetition. What I mean is, though the exact same lace pattern is repeated at either end, it looks asymmetrical, but not unattractively so.
• I find the shawl shaping method particularly elegant (though I do say so myself). As the decreases grow, the shawl narrows. In fact, this is the only tweak you need to make to shape the shawl. The decrease method (which I showed you in this video), remains exactly the same.
• It’s a nice balance of mindless knitting & lace.
• It knits up in a weekend. Who is above the lure of instant gratification? Not me!

The lace sections at either end look pretty when you use the shawlette as a scarf, but they also function as ties if you’d rather wear it around your shoulders.

spring steal

PARASOLS EBOOK – £5

I would like to say that spring has stolen up on me, but I can’t remember a more dull, drizzly or dreary April! These slightly blurry shots were the best I could get, and it’s chilly enough right now that I’m wearing the shawlette around my neck as I type. Still, I’m all excitement for my first pattern bundle! Buying the Stole & Shawlette together will save you £1, which you can will spend on yarn. :)

let’s do it!

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” – Annie Dillard

That might be the tagline of my spring collection. I know some people think sitting & knitting as far from “living” as you can get (that Edvard Munch quotation comes to mind), but where spending days are concerned – and spend them we must – knitting in the afternoon, quietly, contentedly, must come close to bliss. I would be honoured if you were to spend your afternoon with me & my patterns. Which is why…

Please invite your friends/readers also! Here’s the code to place on your blog:

<a href="http://laylock.org/blog"><img src="http://laylock.org/images/blog/parasol-kal.png"/></a>

(You can also link directly to the Ravelry Laylock Designs Group, if you’d prefer.)

Are you also participating in 11 shawls in 2011? I am! You will be glad to know that both the Parasol Stole & Shawlette qualify (in terms of yardage & style) for the challenge. So that puts my current count at 5 and a half.

I hope it’s sunny where you are, lovely knitters & that your yarns are colourful enough to put the spring blossoms to shame. Have a gorgeous weekend! xx

* Every time I say “shallow shawls”, I get that Cole Porter song stuck in my head: “In shallow shoals English soles do it / Goldfish in the privacy of bowls do it / Let’s do it, let’s fall in love”.

Some pattern specs…

Have you read?

1. Pretty as a Painted Parasol
2. Wordless Wednesday
3. Pink Haze

In 2005, the extent of my lace knitting experience was a feather & fan baby blanket, and (diving in at the deep end, as usual), the most difficult (and prettiest) piece from the Homework collection on Knitting-and.com. It took me a while to find these photos…

I don’t think I’d even seen much knitted lace, but my imagination (& ambition) was probably fuelled by a few books in my Grandma’s collection, one of which was Knit One, Make One, by Furze Hewitt; and some pieces I saw on the Livejournal knitting community. My vision was a lace stole, with swallows darting daintily to & fro, and spilling out of the garter stitch border at either end. The centre would have some patterning, to symbolise the swallow’s long seasonal migration. I also wanted to try to depict the bird’s motion, and the direction of its feathers. Ha! I bungled along, sewing swatches into my knitting book, and making detailed notes…

Yes, I even checked out a book on swallows & made some sketches. When I look back at these, I sort of admire 1. my documentation, and 2. my sheer audacity. Even now this would take a lot of fiddling, swatching, and moving stitches around in Mac Numbers. At the time, not even fully understanding the concept of left- and right-leaning decreases, and working on squared notebook paper, it was more than a little preposterous. I guess it was my love of the graceful form of the swallow, and a desire to break out of the symmetrical nature of most lace, that has made the vision for this design so long-lasting. I think I now have enough of an understanding of lace to give this a fair go, and I intend to, one of these days. My thoughts on the concept of “skill” haven’t changed much though. Here’s an extract from my (digital) journal from August 2005:

knitting lace really isn’t as complicated as it looks. it needs a good deal of patience, but it’s a slow little world you can recede into, weaving miles and miles of thread into a small space. i like to sit on my bed, with no music or radio and certainly no television, and concentrate. if you count and count very carefully you will understand the joy of reaching the end of a row with the right amount of stitches. and if you find you have lost count, it is usually because your mind has wandered, and then you might learn just how unused you are to thinking of just one thing. but you will make a mistake eventually anyway, and then stitch by stitch undo your work, or pull the needle out and try to catch the loops a row down. a lifeline, a length of embroidery thread, woven through the live stitches with a tapestry needle and left in place as you knit, will help you redress, or catch any stitches you drop.

My recent experience teaching my friends how to knit has only reinforced this belief that skill is more about concentration than innate ability, or even practice. When I compare some of the wonky garter stitch I’ve produced while watching Youtube videos, to the perfect bumps my friends make, each with great care and concentration… I can’t help but feel a little embarrassed.

A little OT, but I also wanted to mention this TED talk, and how much I like the idea of looking at self-development as a computer game, where you really can +1 strength, +1 health, etc. :)

My initiation into the world of circular jumpers (and indeed jumpers in general) came with Stephanie Japel’s ‘Angelica‘. I fell in love with it the moment I saw the photo, and stalked Stephanie’s blog until she put the pattern up. It took me 3 days to knit (I was procrastinating an English essay), and I was utterly fascinated by the process. Angelica is knit top-down, in the round, with yo raglan increases and a beautiful, highly unusual neckline. I’ve knit quite a few top-down jumpers and cardigans since then, and it’s definitely become my method of choice, but this is the first time I’ve tried to knit a bottom-up jumper. The main reason I decided to try it was that I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with the neckline of this jumper. Boatneck? V-Neck? Cowl neck? I was leaning towards the cowl neck, but then I wasn’t sure how much yarn I’d have left to play with. It turned out I had plenty. The yarn is Himalaya Padişah (talk about an incongruous name) which is a Turkish yarn. It’s a 70/30 acrylic/wool blend that’s actually quite nice; fuzzy, but with a sheen, loosely spun and about aran weight. The colours cycle smoothly through blues, purples and bluey greens, creating subtle stripes. My Mum gave me this yarn (she’s more into cotton & linen), which makes it even more special.

I ended up knitting the body three times. The first time there was too little ease, the second time, too much, and finally on the third go I got it right. It just goes to show that you can do the maths and estimations, but you still can’t be sure until you try it out. I decided not to bother with waist-shaping, but I did work a few decreases after the ribbing to prevent the stocking stitch from sagging outwards, as it tends to do, just in the right place to make you look like you’ve got a spare tyre.

I was quite excited by the possibility of raglan decreases instead of increases, and I nicked a trick from Véronik Avery’s ‘Offset Raglan‘ in Simple Style (which I reviewed here): left and right-slanting double decreases divided by two purl stitches. The book doesn’t seem to specify which decreases to use, and I found that a k3tog wasn’t a very good match for the sl1 k2tog psso, so I substituted a double decrease that Mary Thomas mentions in her Knitting Book: sl1, k1, psso, return st to left needle, pass 2nd st on left needle over 1st st. This creates a more clearly-defined right slant, rather than the bunchy-looking k3tog.

I continued the four pairs of purl stitches up the cowl neck, which is almost as long as the body when unfolded. It can be worn unfolded, or folded in half with the right side facing, or rolled down to show the reverse. I think it works really well & it’s just loose enough to keep you warm without choking you.

One of the biggest drawbacks of bottom-up jumpers as opposed to top-down ones, is the need for underarms seams. Seams? On a seamless sweater? It’s a bit difficult to visualise why this is the case, but basically, when you go to join the sleeves, the long circular needles you’re using for the body can’t bend around to accomodate the narrower sleeves. The solution is to put aside (or bind off) a certain number of stitches from both the body and the sleeves, and join them up later on, by grafting, seaming or a three-needle bind-off. Definitely a bit of a drag. I opted to graft mine, which left two circular holes on either side. These I closed up by threading the yarn around the hole, like the top of a hat, and pulling tight.

I love this jumper, and bottom-up construction definitely has its place, but top-down is still my favourite. Here’s a run-down of the pros & cons of each approach. Let me know in the comments if you can think of others!

Bottom-Up

Pros

• The chance to use some decorative decreases for the yoke.
• The chance to defer the decision of what to do with the yoke/neckline until you have a better idea what the jumper will look like as a whole.

Cons

• Underarm seams! On a “seamless” pullover. Tch tch!
• The need for an extra set of circs to join the sleeves onto the body (though their size doesn’t really matter).
• More difficult than top-down to adjust length.
• Lots of balls of yarn/ends dangling about after you join the sleeves.

Top-Down

Pros

• It’s easier to make adjustments depending on how much yarn you have left. Shorter sleeves, shorter body, etc. This is one of my favourite things about top-down jumpers.
• It’s easier to try on as you go along, and get a good idea of fit.
• The chance to use decorative increases (hello yo!).
• Can be accomplished with one pair of circs. As long as you’re happy magic looping.

Cons

• Ummm…