WIP Wednesday: Shawls

Shawls are one of my favorite things to knit. I'm flying to Oregon for Thanksgiving tomorrow, so I'm getting ready for the plane ride by casting on a couple projects that I know I'll enjoy knitting on the plane. 

I decided to knit the Anteros Shawl for the Mari Knits Knit-A-Long, but when I went to wind the skein I discovered that my yarn was super tangled, and the yarn was broken into over 20 pieces! It was a huge tangle, and a disappointment since I really love the color. I've contacted the company, and hopefully I'll get a replacement skein. I was really looking forward to knitting with it!

So I started with some Blue Moon Fiber Arts BFL Sport that I had sitting in my stash. This time I am working increases on both sides of the edge, to make this shawl wider than the original. This little bit has taken just over an hour.   

If you'd like to participate in the KAL, just pick any one of my patterns and post your project page to the KAL thread in the Mari Knits Ravelry Group. I'm going to be offering prizes, and for every 10 participants that join there will be an additional prize added, so no matter how many people join you have a 1 in 10 chance of winning! 

My other WIP is a shawl in lace weight yarn. This shawl is only slightly larger than the other one above, but has taken me a LOT longer. There's a big difference between knitting with sport weight yarn and lace! The Anteros shawl I'm knitting on a size 7, and this shawl on a size 2! It's going to take forever... 

New Pattern: Anteros Shawl

I'm super excited about another new pattern: the Anteros Shawl! I've blogged about this shawl a few times, last month, and way back in July. This shawl was the sample for my Design Your Own Shawl Class at Warm 'N Fuzzy, which is going on now! It's an awesome class, and I'm super excited to be teaching it, and I really enjoy talking about and explaining lace charting, shawl construction, and the math involved in shawls.

There were a ton of requests for THIS shawl however, so I decided to finally write up the pattern. I had a lot of help along the way from some amazing test knitters who caught a few very silly errors, and they also knit it in all different weights from lace to DK. One of the things I love most about this shawl is how customizable it is! You can start the lace stripes at any point in the pattern, make them as wide or as narrow as you'd like, make the shawl as big as you'd like, and you get the idea.

The original name for this shawl was Background Lace Shawl, because that's the name of the stitch pattern from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting. I thought this was kind of a boring name, so then I thought about what other people like to name knitting patterns. It's hard to try to explain my train of thought because it's so jumbled, but I somehow decided that I was sick of all the unrequited love (not in my personal life, but in books and movies), because who doesn't want to be loved back? So I decided to name this shawl Anteros, for the Greek god of requited love.

Now through November 18 (which is the beginning of my KAL on Ravelry) you can get 50% off on this pattern! Enter the code LOVE12 at checkout or follow this link. 

A big thanks to Katy and Kevin Doyle for the photography!

I posted photos of this shawl back in July. I made it with Swans Island Organic Merino Fingering, an amazingly soft and squishy yarn in lovely colors as a shop sample for Warm 'N Fuzzy for my design your own shawl class. Well, the shawl itself has gotten a lot of interest while hanging in the shop, and so I'm finally going to write and publish the pattern. The shawl is off in the mail to Katy to be properly photographed (you'll see from the evidence below that I'm a terrible photographer) and this pattern is ready to be test knit! If you'd like to test knit this for me, I'm doing it in the Free Pattern Testers Group on Ravelry.

WIP Wednesday: Pine Cone Shawl

I can't share most of the things I'm working on right now, I actually have two things blocking right now, which makes me feel very productive. Here's one of my WIPs, a shop sample of the Pine Cone Shawl. This is made with Frog Tree Pediboo, which is a merino and bamboo blend that is really nice to work with. It has the silkiness of bamboo without the splitty quality of 100% bamboo. I haven't gotten to the lace section yet, and honestly I haven't been working on it very much.

WIP

The original