back to the present

My knitting is all over the place at the moment. After desperately trying to finish things and reduce the number of works in progress, I indulgence cast on for a pile of things. This is one of them, Andrea's Shawl by Kristin Kapur of Through the Loops.

I really liked this shawl as soon as I saw it quite some time ago, the way the edging sits, the stripes, the embossed leaves but I was put off by its triangular shape. Every now and then I look at the project galleries in Ravelry for designs that I like or have queued up to knit and I saw a lovely example of this shawl knit in Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool, of which I just happened to have six balls in stash just waiting for a project. Aha, inspiration moment!

Many have remarked that this shawl comes out very small so I am making the largest size, in a dk- instead of sport-weight yarn and on 4.5mm needles to boot. As shown above, I've started on the striping and am really happy with how it is looking.

I am going to endeavour to modify the triangular-ness of it somewhat, though, and to this end did some test knits as to how decreases affect shawl shape. I did them in some spare candy floss pink yarn and show them here not for your viewing pleasure but to share my new found knowledge with the world at large. (These are all shown with the cast on edge at the bottom of the picture.)

These are typical triangular shawl decreases - a centred double decrease and paired edge decreases (ssk and k2tog) worked every other row. Interestingly, it doesn't actually give a very flat edge across the top, that comes with blocking.

If you only work the centred double decrease every other row you get this shape above.

And this if you worked only the paired edge decreases.

This shape is produced by knitting the centred double decrease on every row and the paired edge decreases every other row. As you can see, it produces an even pointier triangle (and I could not work out how to do a cdd on the purl side).

And when you work the centred double decrease every other row and the paired edge decreases on every row, which is something more of the shape that I would like to achieve, a shallower triangle.