I Knitted a New Blended Shawl!

My Blended Shawl pattern is perfect for using up sock and fingering-weight yarn leftovers. I knitted a flurry of shawls during the fall and late summer and ended up with a lot of leftover bits in very complementary colours. So what else was there to do except knit a new Blended Shawl?

The Pattern

The pattern is a free one here on my website: Blended Shawl. It’s all garter stitch and easy to follow and it’s very adaptable to however much yarn you have on hand. I had a lot and this shawl ended up being much larger than my original one that’s shown on the pattern page. That’s what’s great about this pattern. You use whatever yarn you have on hand. It doesn’t even have to be leftovers. Use anything you want! And knit for as long as you want or until you run out of yarn. Use as many or as few colours as you like. It’s completely up to you!

Choosing Colours

I added all my new leftovers to the other fingering-weight leftovers I had been accumulating and from that I chose the colours I wanted to use. I chose a nice progression from purple, through blue, and then green, and then ending with copper. You might recognize the Copper and Blue Spruce colourways from Emily C Gillies that I used in my recent 8 Simple Stripes Shawl. There’s also a small bit of Malabrigo Mechita in Violin from my new From Summer To Fall Shawl. There are also several Koigu Pencil Box colours from my Lovely Stripes as well as some SweetGeorgia Lilac. The variegation in those Koigu mini skeins really helped to blend colours together so beautifully throughout the shawl.

My strategy was to just follow my intuition and choose whichever colour seemed to come next and to knit for however long with it that I liked (depending on the amount I had). I ended up leaving out some colours I originally chose because once I started knitting the colours I just kept changing my mind!

I blended each new colour in according to the pattern instructions. Because I had a significant solid colour section at the beginning I decided to do a bunch of solid colour rows at the end to match, kind of like bookends.

Finishing

In the end I had about 190 stitches on my needle as opposed to about 144 on my original Blended Shawl. This is an asymmetrical triangular shape shawl. It’s kind of a boomerang shape once it’s blocked. Making it too big can create more of a long scarf shape than a triangle. So I didn’t want it to get any longer than this. It was definitely time to stop.

I knitted in most of my ends as I went so once I was done I had very little finishing to do. I washed and blocked it and ended up with a fabulous new fall and winter accessory.

I hope you have as much fun creating your Blended Shawls as I do. It’s a great creative colour project and a wonderful way to use up leftover yarns. Oh, and all that garter stitch makes for some good mindless knitting to have on hand when you need it.

Share your Blended Shawls on social media using #blendedshawl. I’d love to see them!