Tuesday 3 May 2011

Endellion Shawl

This is a project on a Tuesday. Not a tool.

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It was a struggle to photograph the entirety of the shawl, but hopefully you can build up a patchwork picture from the photos that I post. I took lots of photographs of the edging, because I think that it is quite beautiful, less of the garter stitch centre.

The Endellion shawl is a hybrid project - a garter stitch centre, based on the centre to the Multnomah Shawl by Kate Flagg, and then a crocheted flowery edging based upon the edging to the Midsummer Night's Shawl by Lisa Naskrent. It used one skein of Posh Yarn's Pamela in a colourway which I think was called 'Writing My Memoirs', but I'm not quite sure. Suffice to say it is dark blue, with 5% Stellina sparkle incorporated into the yarn. Initially, I was somewhat wary of a 'sparkly' yarn (they seem ubiquitous in UK indie dyers at the moment), but the sparkle isn't very obvious - it just gives it something a little magical when it catches the light, rather than looking like it has an obvious plastic strand in the yarn.

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The intention with doing a hybrid knit-crochet project was to get the most out of both crafts - I wanted it to be densely stitched in the centre - hence the garter stitch, but lacy at the edge. I also wanted to take advantage of the low yardage and easier drape that you can achieve with dense stitches in knitting, so that there was more yarn left for the lacy crocheted flowers at the edge. I also wanted something slightly mindless at the beginning.

If you want to recreate the Endellion Shawl, then this is a rough guide: you'll need to knit the Multnomah centre until you have about 220 sts, then switch to looking at the Midsummer Night's pattern. I did three rows (because I hadn't got enough sts, but just do as many rows as you need to get the right number) of dc, adding increases at the centre like on the pattern (the chart is super helpful). Then I did Rows 5-7 of the edging twice, if you look atht the picture above, then you'll be able to see how I added extra increases at the centre.

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This was a fun project- slightly mindless with all the garter stitch, but a great piece of problem solving to work out how to make the edging work. It also reminded me how awful I am at guessing how much yarn is left in a ball - I only did the edging once as I thought that I was about to run out, so I bound off. Then I realised that I had a sizable ball left so I decided to keep crocheting until I ran out - which was almost exactly after I'd done a whole repeat of Rows 5-7. Perfect!

1 thoughts:

Rebekah said...

Hi Sarah,

Can knit and crochet look so good together? Your shawl is stunning. I wish there were more patterns available that include both forms of needlework. Many die-hard knitters and crocheters would disagree with me, but if they see your shawl, they may just have a change of heart. ;)

Rebekah

 
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