The Graceful Shawl

Earlier this year my lovely brother visited Peru and bought me back ten balls of baby alpaca wool - two each of five colours. It is beautifully soft. 

The Graceful from Shawls and Scarves

I wanted to make something that used all or most of the yarn so had a bit of a hunt through my pattern books and magazines. I tried a scarf using drop stitch but thought I would continuously catch my fingers in it so unravelled it. I settled in the end for a pattern called "The Graceful" in a Knitting Magazine collection of patterns for shawls and scarves

It is very easy knitting - my brain just needed to be in gear to design the stripes as I knitted and to remember to leave a loop at each end of a row to create the fringe. I missed quite a few of the fringe loops and had to add them at the end.

the white on the left is the waste thread.

The shawl is knitted as a large rectangle. In the centre you make the split for the fronts by using a waste thread, which you remove at the end and finish as an edge.

An advantage of the design is that you know exactly how much wool you have used at the half-way mark.

 As I had two balls of each colour, I adjusted the first half to use one ball of each colour - with the exception of red. A little red went a long way in terms of design.

It was a slow, but easy task to remove the waste thread and knit an edge around the split.

When completed you fold in half and stitch up the lower part of each side - forming arm holes. The result is more of a loose shrug than a shawl.

I finished with the best part of a ball of red and the tiny bit of brown and dark grey.

Knotting the fringe took quite a few hours - quite soothing work.

This is, of course, of no use at all at the moment where we have begun 4 days of temperatures over 95 Fahrenheit - including a predicted 105 on Christmas Day. I did however, want to finish it in the year the wool was given to me.                                                                                                     It is also not shown at its best over my pink tshirt, but I couldn't wait to try it. It is marvellously soft, warm and very cheerful - just the thing for winter. It will remind me of our warm Christmas every time I wear it.                                                      Joy to the World