If you follow me on Instagram you’ve seen two versions of my latest shawl pattern Lovely Stripes. There’s the original version in shades of purple that the pattern was written for. It uses a five-skein set of SweetGeorgia mini skeins. The mini skeins are 28 grams each plus an almost full skein of a sixth colour. I love purples and it’s beautiful but even while I was knitting that original version my brain was churning with other ideas. This ten-stripe shawl is calling out for colour experimentation. The ten stripes alternate between garter stitch stripes and eyelet stripes and it’s a perfect fit for mini skeins, fade sets, creative colour combinations, or even yarn leftovers.
Yarn Selection
For the second version of this shawl I did a little online searching and settled on a Koigu Pencil Box from Wool and Waves, a great little online yarn store here on Vancouver Island. Koigu is a fabulous Canadian yarn company based in Ontario and this Pencil Box sets is made up of ten mini-skeins of KPPPM (Koigu Painter’s Palette Premium Merino), a beautiful merino wool fingering weight yarn. There are many colour combos to choose from. I loved the gentle colours of this Sweet Pea set and the fact that three of the skeins are quite close in colour was important too. I’ll explain that in a moment. Most importantly, ten mini-skeins was a perfect match for my ten-stripe shawl.
These Koigu mini-skeins are 25 grams each. The pattern calls for 28 gram mini-skeins. My plan was to use one mini-skein per stripe. The pattern includes yarn requirements for each stripe with the first stripe being the smallest and the last stripe is the largest. The last and second-to-last stripes require more than 25 grams each. So I decided to do the first two stripes with one colour. They are the smallest stripes and can easily be done with less than 25 grams.
This freed up a skein to use at the end when the yarn requirement gets tighter. The three similar colours were perfect for the end because I knew I could blend three colours across two stripes and it wouldn’t be very noticeable.
Knitting the Stripes
I didn’t knit the mini-skeins in the exact order as they were in the box although I did still work from dark to light colours. The brown/orange blend was my choice to start the shawl with and then I worked through the greens and then the blues. The lightest colours were used at the end. There was no need to carry the yarns because each stripe was a new colour. (I knitted in my ends as I worked, so I wouldn’t have to do it later).
I did not blend the colours together at each colour change, although that could be done to create a more faded effect. To do that, you could alternate the skeins at every right side row for several rows when changing colours just as you would alternate hand-dyed skeins or skeins from different dye lots. This mini-skein set of colours faded quite naturally into each other so I just followed the pattern as written and knitted each colour as a new stripe.
When I got to the second-to-last stripe, however, I carefully compared my remaining three mini-skeins. All three were similar but one had more saturated pink spots than the other two. I wanted the last stripe to have that darker pink so I blended the other two colours mostly in the second-to-last stripe. It’s a garter stitch stripe so I did two repeats of the garter stitch pattern (that’s 8 rows of garter stitch, 4 per repeat) and then I alternated the other skein into the third repeat of the garter stitch pattern. I finished the stripe with the other colour. The blend isn’t noticeable at all.
Finishing
I didn’t want to blend too much of that second colour into the last stripe though. I wanted to use mainly the darker pink there. So I continued with it for the first two rows of the eyelet pattern in the 10th stripe, added the final colour for the next two rows, did two more rows of the first colour, and then finished the stripe with the final darker pink colour. I had been using my scale to weigh as I worked the last two stripes and it seemed like it would work out. However, I wasn’t too worried about running out of that final colour. I knew the other similar colours could be used when I ran out. Luckily, I made it to halfway through the bind-off before I did run out. I finished the bind-off with the similar shade. Next, came blocking.
Blocking is important for this shawl. It opens up the eyelets and gives it that light airy look. I block my shawls quite hard to get them as light and airy as possible. So I blocked to the pattern measurements (which required a large space to do) and it blocked beautifully into a nice curved shape, perfect for wrapping around the shoulders. The size and shape of this shawl are perfect.
I’m looking forward to seeing all of the fun colour combinations you all use to knit your Lovely Stripes shawls! Be sure to add your project to Ravelry or show your photos on social media. On social media use the hashtag #lovelystripesshawl. Happy knitting!