New Shawl Pattern and Kits coming soon
By Megan Goodacre
So I have all these beautiful skeins of Marjorie, another handpainted yarn from Sweatermaker Yarns (you can see a few of them here), and I wanted to put kits together.
It's a great little yarn, about 350 m in one 100 gram skein, 50% merino 50% silk. I would describe it a heavy fingering weight, but it shows up on Ravelry as sport weight. I've made a couple of single-skein patterns for it, Oaklet Shawl and Gingham Scarf, but wanted to make a more advanced pattern for the kit.
Here's a sneak peek of Fledge (named for the first flying horse). I wanted to come up with a slightly unusual lace pattern for it; the feathers in Fledge are separated by double eyelets, and don't intersect the way most diamond or chevron patterns do. This means that it gets quite airy when blocked.
I experimented with the bind off too; the points are made by adding chain stitches during the bind off then blocking them into points. And as usual, my goal with lace is to get the most bang for my buck; I'm a lazy knitter and assume that there are others like me. So there are plenty of rest rows and the pattern is easy to read visually and easy to memorize.
During the process of designing Fledge, I went through many different construction options. I actually worked an entire shawl using short rows and an asymmetrical construction, but realized that for a single-skein project in hand-painted yarn, the top-down triangular construction works really well.
It's a nice gradual start for the beginner lace knitter, and it also distributes the colours nicely since the row lengths are constantly changing. I've collected some of my research on shawl construction into an article which you might find useful: shawl anatomy
It's a great little yarn, about 350 m in one 100 gram skein, 50% merino 50% silk. I would describe it a heavy fingering weight, but it shows up on Ravelry as sport weight. I've made a couple of single-skein patterns for it, Oaklet Shawl and Gingham Scarf, but wanted to make a more advanced pattern for the kit.
Here's a sneak peek of Fledge (named for the first flying horse). I wanted to come up with a slightly unusual lace pattern for it; the feathers in Fledge are separated by double eyelets, and don't intersect the way most diamond or chevron patterns do. This means that it gets quite airy when blocked.
I experimented with the bind off too; the points are made by adding chain stitches during the bind off then blocking them into points. And as usual, my goal with lace is to get the most bang for my buck; I'm a lazy knitter and assume that there are others like me. So there are plenty of rest rows and the pattern is easy to read visually and easy to memorize.
During the process of designing Fledge, I went through many different construction options. I actually worked an entire shawl using short rows and an asymmetrical construction, but realized that for a single-skein project in hand-painted yarn, the top-down triangular construction works really well.
It's a nice gradual start for the beginner lace knitter, and it also distributes the colours nicely since the row lengths are constantly changing. I've collected some of my research on shawl construction into an article which you might find useful: shawl anatomy