holli

I designed this to wear to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival last year, and knit it in Knitpicks Bare dyed blue, on a size 4 circular needle. The Flickr set has more pictures and the complete charts.

This shawl is knit from the center back, so you start with very few stitches and end with a whole heck of a lot. My preferred cast-on for a shawl constructed this way is as follows:

Use a provisional cast-on in a waste yarn. Cast on three stitches. Knit 7 rows garter stitch, then pick up 7 stitches along the side of the strip you've just knitted. Undo the provisional cast-on and pick up the last three stitches. You now have 13 stitches, and are ready to begin the first row of the chart.

I knit this with a 3-stitch wide garter edging-- just add a k3 to the start and end of every row on the chart.

I did about 14 repeats before beginning the edging, and wound up with a generously-sized shawl. Simply change the number of repeats for a larger or smaller shawl.

This is not quite the same edging as on the original shawl, as that was kludged-together and badly improvised. I came up with a really weird way of casting off, but it actually worked quite well with my decision to add a crochet edging, and I recommend it if you want a crochet edging too. Basically, I worked one last row in (yo, k2tog) the whole way across before casting off as loosely as possible. Then, with a size H (I think, I don't have it handy) crochet hook, I worked (ch8, sc) into every other yo hole along the cast-off edge. Then I turned around and did the same thing in the other direction, this time using the loops I'd just made instead of the cast-off edge. I don't crochet a whole lot, so I'm not sure if that makes sense-- if not ask and I'll try to clarify.

If you can't read lace charts, this may not be the pattern for you, since it took me like a year to even put the charts together, and quite frankly a line-by-line pattern is not happening any time soon. If you would like to write a line-by-line pattern for your own convenience, feel free to share it!

eta to clarify: Chart 1 is half the shawl, as knitted. There's a 1-stich column between the two halves of the shawl. So on row 1 of the chart, you k3 for the edging, yo, k3, yo, and then k1 before you yo, k3, yo again, and then k3 for the other half of the edging. Does that make sense?