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Summer Shawl

I have been pretty good about busting my stash this year.  The only new yarn purchased in 2017 has been the variegated lace to complete the Waiting for Rain shawl, the souvenir possum yarn purchased in New Zealand (to be revealed soon) and an inexpensive Australian 8 ply weight wool yarn purchased in Wisconsin.  The focus this year in stash busting has been on using up the DK, fingering and lace weight yarns that inexplicably found their way to my homes.  To that end I purchased Stephen West's Shawlscape class from Craftsy to pick up some good ideas, but unlike Stephen, my design skills are less developed so I continue to look for patterns.  Though as you will see alternations can be made to suit my whims.

 Summer Shawl by STASH Lounge in Ravelry is a simple, asymmetrical scarf/shawl that uses two colours in a rather clever way.

Photo credit to STASH Lounge
 The blocks of relatively solid colours all done in garter stitch are broken up with stripes.  That scalloped edging is added after the shawl is cast off using single and double crochet stitches. It was mindless knitting that carries a certain impact due to the colours.

There were four skeins, two in a colour called Curry and two in Thistle of Isager yarn in my stash.  My selected colours are both muted and earthy so a patch of left over turquoise wool (the hank band is long gone) was added for the needed pop of colour.  Here's my version.



Yup in Minneapolis at the moment
There were two alterations.  My yarn was DK and in order to get the type of drape in the fabric I wanted size 5 or 3.75 mm needles were used.  The drop in needle size caused a need to add 50% more to each of the pattern segments in order to get an acceptable size.  For instance, instead of the first segment increasing to 42 stitches my version increased to 63 stitches.  And in the second stripe section I knit 12 stripes instead of the patterns 8 stripes and so on throughout the entire pattern.

Summer Shawl does not have a designated future owner, but it has occurred to me a male could wear it as easily as a woman because the colours are so subtle.  My only regret with this project is only two of the four skeins were used so another pattern will need to found to use the remaining yarn.

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