Even though I’m working on a sweater – and maybe because I’m working on a sweater – I’ve been looking longingly at shawls the last few times I’ve spent time on Ravelry. I’ve ostensibly been looking for a pattern for one skein of a new Indian silk yarn
that I just bought from Vijay Fibers – sport weight, luminous, it will be lovely for summer – but my searches brought home to me just how many ways there are to knit and wear a shawl, and why they seem to be the accessory of the moment.
There was a time (oh, no, the old girl’s reminiscing again) back in the olden days of the early oughts when knitting a shawl meant using lace-weight yarn and a complicated lace pattern. These ventures were for experienced knitters only, and the larger and more complicated, the more breathless admiration you got from fellow knitters. Very little was online in those days so you bought a printed pattern, often designed by Evelyn Clark for Fiber Trends:
or Dorothy Siemans for Fiddlesticks:
Their beautiful designs are on Ravelry now and I urge you to check them out.
The other common type of shawl you might be talking about, but rarely knitting, in those days, would be a traditional Shetland type of shawl. These practical shawls could be quite plain or very colorful and fancy. They were used to keep warm and were generally made of a wooly wool in fingering or sport weight. They could be triangles but were often large squares that, when folded in half along the diagonal, would be doubly toasty. Kate Davies has a wonderful book about these traditional shawls and many designs on Ravelry.
These days, the sky is the limit if you’re looking for a shawl pattern. There are 46,000+ patterns on Ravelry for knitted shawls. And 23,000+ have 5-star ratings! There are designs for any weight of yarn, from lace weight to super-bulky, and using any technique you can imagine – slip-stitches, brioche, intarsia, mosaic, and on and on. We have many examples in the shop, of course, and I often use one on when the shop is cold (which is every day in the winter.) The other day I was showing someone Deb’s Easy-Goes-It Shawlette, which she’s teaching soon (and is a great first project if you’ve never knit one of these pieces) and I threw it around my neck and there it stayed for hours. It’s light but was just that little bit of extra warmth I needed to be comfortable, and it serendipitously happened to go just right with the top I had on! Who doesn’t love it when that happens?
So, what will I knit with my one beautiful skein of silk sportweight? (One skein only because, as I mentioned, I’m working on a sweater – probably.) I have my eye on a beautiful gold solid, but there is also a wonderful multi with gold, dusty pink, and gray that keeps noodging me.
I think it needs to be an asymmetrical design because you can usually just stop when you’re almost out of yarn. Because it’s for spring and summer, I don’t want it to be a large shawl, just a little something to keep my shoulders warm in air conditioning and/or to dress up a plain shirt. This pattern by Grethe Mensen is already in my faves:
I think it would be beautiful in the solid gold.
And this one by Jana Huck is simple enough to be stunning in a multi:
Both would need the needle size adjusted for sport weight, but no big deal.
Well, I have to say that talking it through didn’t make my decision, but it did narrow it down from 46,000 to 2. That’s a step in the right direction!
What will you knit for spring??
