On The Third Day of Christmas

Today is my favourite shawl of those I’ve finished recently. And there are a lot of them as that is mostly what I am making at the moment.

The shawl started off as this.


And the blog post about it is here. I loved the yarns but did not really like the finished object for two reasons. The top of the shawl had a big hump. This can be a problem in varying degrees in many shawl patterns but was particularly pronounced in this pattern. The other reason is that I had quite a bit of yarn left over which I wanted to use and also meant that the finished shawl wasn’t quite big enough.

I did not want to rip out this project until I had found another pattern as I did not want the yarn to sit in stash; at least as a shawl I had something I could wear. The first pattern I tried did not work with the yarn as there were areas of two stripes of each colour and they blended rather than contrasted. I then chose Tokerau Shawl by Francoise Danoy which happens to be a free pattern on Ravelry.

The blocks of colour with different patterns were ideal for my yarn. I used the left over yarn first and then just knit straight off the previous finished object. Sure it was crinkly but I knew blocking would help. I still had blue yarn left over so I worked another pattern repeat with it and used the other colour for the garter stitch edge and bind off. Instead of picot bind off as the pattern, I worked a row of YO, K2tog before the last knit row and Icelandic bind off with a strand of each colour. The final result is what I wanted: a pattern that shows off both yarns, an item I can wear and no leftovers in stash.

Here is a photo of the shawl pre-blocking as there is quite a difference between off the needles and the finished object.