I’ve finished knitting up Pangea, my first lace shawl design. I bound off on Thursday, and my friend Chris helped my do the blocking on Friday. As soon as the yarn from Curious Creek arrives so Chris can start test knitting, I’ll begin posting the pattern as a KAL. Chris will stay a step or two ahead of the published pattern—that way, if I’ve made mistakes in writing up the steps, I’ll only tick her off and not a whole crew of knitters.
Here’s the shawl on Thursday afternoon, pre-blocking:
And here it is all pinned out on Friday:
This yarn in this particular coloway (Silk Noil and Shetland Lamswool in Melgund from Simply Shetland) is just a nightmare to photograph. In real life, it’s a lovely creamed spinach shade (yes, I’m using lovely and creamed spinach in the same sentence). On film it washes out to a grubby grey-green that doesn’t begin to do it justice. Wearing it makes me feel like a forest nymph, draped in soft mosses. In case you’re more of a river nymph type, don’t worry: Chris will be knitting up the individual steps in a delicious, watery blue, so you’ll have two very different color options to consider.
The hardest—and most delightful—part of designing this project was deciding how to transition from one stitch to another. I had fun playing with shortened/lengthened/widened versions of one stitch as a segue into the next. My goal was to have a series of stitches that were each distinct, but that didn’t separate out along a fixed, hard line when one looked at them. (Now I’m toying with ideas for a very hard-line shawl, but that’s still in the incubation stage.) The hardest bit of knitting this project was the last nine rows, which are true lace, with the pattern knit in on both right side and wrong side rows—definitely neither bed-time knitting nor knitting to drink wine by.
Once the KAL gets going, I hope you’ll enjoy this project as much as I have. Meanwhile, I’m toting the shawl about with me, petting it during breaks between my various work and home chores, and forcing all my non-knitting friends to admire it.