Month: October 2008

I adopted Sparky and his now-departed brother Woody in the spring of 2006. I was down to just Beatrice at home and thinking of enlarging the family, so I stopped by my vet’s before heading to Oakland to see Melissa one Friday and there the boys were. They were utterly devoted to one another and couldn’t be separated.

You can imagine the phone call to Melissa: “I’m on my way, but I stopped and met two kittens, and I think their names are Sparky and Woody, and the vet says I can take them for the weekend to see how we get along, but I don’t have to adopt them if we decide I shouldn’t—you don’t mind if I bring them with me, do you?”

Generous-hearted Melissa said I should, of course, bring them, knowing that there never really had been any other option and that it didn’t matter if adoption wasn’t mandatory, there’d be no going back on these boys. (The fact that I decided on the drive to Oakland that their last name was “Keeper” might have been a clue.)

Sparky and Woody raised kittenly havoc that weekend, breaking several plant-pots and a set of salt-and-pepper shakers and using a large, large split-leaf rhododendrom as a trampoline until it was nearly flattened. As you might imagine, Archy, Maggie, and Damian were rather overwhelmed.

Here’s Melissa’s rendering of the scene.

(If you want to see more of her artwork, you can click here, here, and here.)

Eva’s Pangea chart
Here is a large, clean version of Chart A for the Pangea shawl as a PDF file, thanks to Eva and her Knitvisualizer.

Note the missing K2tog in row 25. It will be obvious if you look for it.

Also note that the decreases on row 21 seven stitches in from the right and six stitches in from the left should be knit stitches. My apologies.

Get out your needles and start knitting! Here’s the PDF for Step 1 of the Pangea Shawl—just click and print.

When I started knitting this piece in the silk/wool blend, I was thinking moss and lichen and bark—a sort of primordial forest. I was quite content with what I was producing, but at the same time, I kept imagining the shawl in blue as well, the sparkling, clear blue of a shallow, pristine bay above white sands. Hence the name Pangea, to honor a time when our planet was just one great land mass surrounded by one enormous sea.

Thanks to Kristine Brooks of Curious Creek Fibers and my test-knitter Chris, I’m now having the pleasure of watching the blue shawl I imagined come into being to compliment the completed green shawl.

Chris did find a few mistakes in the chart for Step 1 (but none in Step 2!), so I’ve corrected those. Thanks to her help, you’ll have a more satisfactory knitting experience.

I plan to post one step every Monday for the next five weeks. The first few steps will go more quickly than the last few as the row length grows. I’ve tried to divide the knitting up so that most steps will offer you something a bit new (Step 3 is the exception, being a continuation of the second stitch established after the transition rows in Step 2.) At the end of Step 1, here’s what you’ll have:

Chris is running a lifeline as she finishes each step so you’ll be able to see where each new segment begins and ends as her shawl grows.

And now for the prize draw.
As an incentive to keep all of you knitting along, I’m putting together a prize draw for the participants. To be entered, you’ll need to finish your shawl within 10 days of when the last step is posted and email me a picture of your completed shawl (shATwhatifknitsDOTcom). I’ll post a gallery of the finished shawls and will draw the name of one lucky winner who will receive a 900+ yard skein of delicious, hand-dyed sock-weight superwash wool from my LYS. I may add other prizes. I’m also thinking of offering a “Viewers’ Choice” prize that could go to the knitter of the completed shawl that gets the most compliments in the comments section. Sound like fun?

The Fine Print
I’m offering this pattern free of charge. Feel free to make photocopies and/or enlargements for your own use. If you want to share the pattern with others, please encourage them to check out this blog and print a pattern for themselves. You are welcome to use the shawl you knit from this pattern as part of a fundraiser for any non-profit (bazaars, raffles, etc.), but please do not sell it for commercial purposes and please do give a shout-out to What If Knits if you can.

Enjoy!

Large Pangea chart
Here is a larger version of Chart A for the Pangea shawl as a PDF file.

I’m not always big on Vogue Knitting. Sometimes it offers worthwhile articles—the series on lace knitting several years ago, for example—but the patterns are often far too “fashion forward” to be of any actual use to me. (If I live to be 300 I will still not have reached a point where I’m ready to wear big-ass knits or knit tube tops or, well, you know what I mean.) But the new holiday issue offers some really nice pieces.

I particularly like the pieces in the Moonlight Sonata section—lots and lots of interesting texture and plenty of lace knitting for those of us who enjoy it.

Because I’ve been working to get Pangea ready for the knit-along, I haven’t been starting new projects, but if I were to cast on another shawl right now I’d choose either the Mariposa Shawl

(pattern $5 from South West Trading Company)

or

Lumiruusu

(free pattern, originally in Ulla and now available in English).

Mariposa has a great draw-through front closure of the kind one sees on neck-warmers. Lumiruusu (which means Snow Rose) has well-designed movement from stitch-pattern to stitch-pattern and is marvelously gossamer.

And one last, cute find. Aren’t these bats darling?

You can purchasethe pattern at Mochimochi Land.