For Christmas, I was gifted a beautiful skein of yarn. I thought a lot about what I would make out of it. First, I wanted to make a hat but did not find a suitable pattern for a fingering weight yarn. Finally, I chose the “In the Land of Oz” shawlette, a free pattern from Adrienne Fong.
Yarn
The yarn is a Merino-Chasmere (70% merino, 10% nylon, 20% cashmere) fingering weight from “A homespun house” in the colorway “Keepsake”. The colors are amazing, I could spend hours just looking at them. There are all shades of purple, grey, and brown tones and even some green and blue speckles. The yarn is also very soft. It was a joy knitting with it.
Construction
This was the first time I knitted a shawl and it took a while until I understood the pattern instructions and how the construction worked. I unripped the first rows at least three times until I got it right. The first part is plain stockinette. After I finished that part I had the wrong number of stitches. Obviously, I had made some mistakes with the increases, but I could not figure out where. In the end, I unripped everything again and started from scratch. To avoid making mistakes again, I placed stitch markers every 10 stitches and counted every other row. This helped me to fix any mistakes immediately.
I also tried a few different options for the edge stitches. I do not remember how I did them in the end, but I knitted only every other row and slipped the edge stitch in the other rows. That gave me a very nice edge finish. Why is it that the right and left sides always behave (and look) slightly differently? When I blocked the shawl, I could barely stretch the right side enough to get the same length as for the left side.
I also used a new to me technique for the stockinette which is called “combined knitting”. This is supposed to ensure that the knit stitches on the right row and the purl stitches on the back row are the same size and you get an even fabric. This is explained very detailed here (German website).
The lace part was not as difficult as I thought it would be and easy to remember. After I finished according to the instructions I still had a good bit of yarn left over. As it was too less to make anything else out of it, I just continued knitting in the lace pattern until I ran out of yarn.
I already wore the shawlette a lot, it goes well with a lot of my sweaters and keeps my neck warm in the office with its air conditioning.
