Vernal Equinox is done! I think this may be my favorite shawl ever (or at least thus far).
I absolutely love the way the pattern moves from one design motif to the next. Even with the doubling of stitches every so often because of the pi construction, you can pick any stitch at the start of the shawl and follow it down to the hem—the flow is perfect! Lankakomero, I salute you!
I knit this beauty out of Possum Lace in the Misty Moor colorway. The dark halo comes from the possum fiber, which is also super warm— not to mention light, light, light and floaty, floaty, floaty.
Even with two skeins of Possum Lace (~900 yards), I wound up just short of the yarn I needed for the bind-off. I looked at local yarn shops, and my friend Chris offered up several of her skeins as possibilities—but I finally found the right yarn hiding in my own stash during search number three. It’s a skein of Knit Picks’ Shimmer in the Bayou colorway. Can you tell the difference?
Proof of my love for this shawl is the fact that I pinned out every little loop on that hem. I believe there were about 300 of them. By time I’d finished pinning, the shawl had already dried, so I had to spritz it with water and allow a second round of blocking.
During the period while I was fretting about what I’d use to bind off Vernal Equinox, I distracted myself by knitting up a Petal Shawlette from Sock Yarn One-Skein Wonders.
The pattern is based on an old afghan square, but it’s been rewritten to form a triangular shawl with a lovely zig-zag of mesh along the bottom and a leaf lace border.
I didn’t have quite enough yarn for the bind-off (do we sense a theme here?), so I finally settled on this yellow-y green alpaca. As I was working with it, my opinion about the color choice swung wildly back and forth. One moment I thought it was genius; the next moment I was sure I was ruining what had been a perfectly lovely shawl up until then.
Now that it’s done, I’m quite pleased. The green seems to blend well with the main yarn (even though the green hues in the main yarn are a different shade), and the leaves really read as leaves this way, instead of just as a curvey hem.
I’m working on a Clotilde now in a DK weight cashmere/wool blend, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to run out of yarn on that one—although I am planning an extra repeat of the border design…