Flirty Ruffles Shawl

Posted on June 4, 2021 by Deborah Cooke

This was the first lace shawl I ever knit. I saw it displayed at the Kitchener-Waterloo Knitters’ Fair and bought everything to knit it on the spot. The pattern is the Flirty Ruffles Shawl by Dorothy Siemens, and I knit mine in Misti Alpaca Lace.

Flirty Ruffles Shawl knit in Misti Alpaca by Deborah Cooke

I don’t remember it being a particularly difficult knit. The pattern is completely charted.

The stitch pattern in the middle of the shawl is Print o’ the Wave, which is one of my favourites.

My Ravelry project page says I knit it in 2007. I miss those shoes! 🙂

Papillon

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Deborah Cooke

Things have been quiet here on the blog for a bit, and I apologize for that. I was slammed at work in April and didn’t have much time for crafting, then had a few fails. 😦 That’s always disheartening. I may circle back to them and see what can be salvaged, then share the results with you. In the meantime, here’s one that is having a happier adventure the second time around.

Papillon is a beautiful and clever shawl pattern using short rows and designed by Marin Melchior. (That’s a Ravelry link.) It’s knit in fingering weight with two colours, one solid and one not.

Remember this Koigu KPPPM that I first used in the body of my teal Navelli?

Navelli by Caitlin Hunter knit in Koigu KPPPM and Shibui Knits Sock by Deborah Cooke

I frogged it back because of the pooling. This yarn has longer sections of each colour (at least for Koigu) so I thought it might work for Papillon.

Papillon shawl knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke

It didn’t really work in this pattern either.

I was determined to use my stash yarn, though, and dug in again. This time, I chose some Noro Silk Garden Sock, which has longer colour changes, and for contrast, a very black alpaca yarn from a local farm. There’s a tiny shimmer of blue spun in with the black alpaca yarn, too. Here’s the beginning:

Papillon shawl knit in Noro Silk Garden Sock by Deborah Cooke

I’m much happier with this version! This is knitting up much more thickly even on the same needles, but since I’m not sure how much black there is (that label’s long gone) I’m sticking to the 3.5mm needles and hoping I have enough black to finish.

Finally, a success!

I have some sweaters breaking free of Sleeve Island and will share one with you next time.

Starling Wrap

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Deborah Cooke

My quest for self-isolation – which is the same as my quest every other year – is to finish up some of the projects I have on my needles. Here’s one that’s been hanging around for a while that is finally done. (Phew.)

The pattern is called Starling Wrap, knit in Rowan Fine Art, and it’s included in the Rowan Fine Art Collection – which was published in 2013. I loved this shawl and bought both the yarn and the book immediately. Rowan Fine Art is a fingering weight yarn, so the book has patterns for socks and shawls. Here’s the Ravelry link for the book, so you can see all of the patterns. I’m not sure how readily available the book is anymore, because the yarn is discontinued.

Here’s the picture from the book of the Starling Wrap. I ordered the same colourway that was used in the sample. And here the perils of online shopping begin to show up. First, for some reason, I thought this colourway (Waxwing) would be reddish or burgundy – in fact, it’s russet, gold and brown. Second, the yarn is also spun hard, which surprised me when it arrived. I was thinking it would be more squishy. Its spin means it’s probably a really good sock yarn for socks. If I had felt it, I probably wouldn’t have bought it for a shawl, and I wouldn’t have chosen this colourway if I’d seen it in real life first. Finally, if I’d flipped through the book before buying it, I would have seen that there were no charts for the lace stitch – just oceans of text instructions. I didn’t cast on until June 2014, according to my Ravelry project page. I made my own chart of the lace stitch and things went reasonably well.

The project then stalled because Rowan chose the Starling Wrap as the free download pattern from the book – I had ordered the book from the UK just for the one pattern – and then they discontinued the yarn, which meant it was half-price everywhere. I was a bit annoyed, which is not conducive to happy knitting.

This yarn is handpainted, btw, but it’s done in a very precise way. (Or maybe it’s precise to each batch or dye lot.) In order to ensure that the variegation worked the same way with each skein, when I got near the end of a skein, I matched the variegation (and its direction) on the next skein by placing the two ends alongside each other.

Last spring, I decided to get it done. The shawl takes three 100g skeins of Rowan Fine Art: I’d knit up two skeins and was well into the third. So, I pulled out the project to just crunch through the rest of it. It’s not TV knitting and it went back in the bag again. Until last week. Out it came. I had started the tenth repeat of the pattern. I was thinking I had to do twelve and use up the yarn to get the length – lo and behold, it was already longer than the pattern specifies. I could have cast off after nine repeats, years ago! LOL So, I finished that repeat and cast it off Saturday. I gave it a good soak and blocked it, and voilà! The endless shawl is done!

Starling Wrap designed by Marie Wallin knit in Rowan Fine Art by Deborah Cooke

It’s enormous, too. I couldn’t take a picture of the whole thing, so this is less than half. And yes, the ends still need to be sewn in. Here’s a detail of the pattern, which is very pretty. The variegation in the yarn made a narrow stripe, which is nice, too.

What do you think?

Finished Nightshift

Posted on January 27, 2021 by Deborah Cooke

This was a project that I feared would never be done. It’s Nightshift, a pattern by Andrea Mowry, (that’s a Ravelry link) but I knit it in Koigu KPPPM – a fingering weight yarn – instead of the aran weight yarn specified. It took a while, but it’s finally finished – and here it is!

Nightshift knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke

And here’s a detail of that left corner:

Yes, I threw it in the snow for the picture. I haven’t blocked it and the cast-off edge (on the left) is rolling a bit. It’s pretty big and has fourteen repeats of the 40 row pattern.

I’ve blogged about this one a couple of times – here (August 2019) and here (September 2019) and here (June 2020). A year and a half. I’m so glad it’s done!

Nightshift shawl by Andrea Mowry knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke

It’s knit in five colours of Koigu KPPPM and I used up all of the yarn – that’s why there are tassels. They used up the last bits.

Here’s my project page on Ravelry with all the nitty gritty details.

What do you think?

Colonnade in Wool Clasica

Posted on December 2, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

I have a tendency to buy yarn because I like it, without a specific project in mind. (This inclination is worse if the yarn is on sale.) That means I guess on quantities and sometimes, I guess too low. That’s what happened with these skeins of Manos del Uruguay Wool Clasica—that’s a Ravelry link btw. Here’s a Fairmont Fibres link, which I think is the US distributor. I loved the colour (it’s #114 Bramble – this link shows the colourway on the FF site) and bought four, but four skeins of aran weight yarn isn’t very much. It’s just 604m and I wanted to make a garment from this.

I first made a vest from this yarn and had to even use the bits from the tags to finish casting off. Even so, the vest was too snug for me so (after some mourning), I frogged it and returned the yarn to the stash. And there it’s been for about a decade.

I rediscovered it recently and remembered how much I liked it. I searched on Ravelry for patterns specifying this very yarn and found Colonnade, a free pattern on Knitty by Stephen West. It might have been one of his earliest patterns—it was posted in 2009. Here’s the Ravelry link, and here’s the Knitty link. The pattern calls for three skeins of this yarn, and uses two different colours. I had four and wanted to use them all up. Hmm. Here’s a picture of the shawl laid flat from the Knitty website:

Colonnade shawl by Stephen West from the Knitty website

You can see that the shawl is in four quadrants. If you look a little closer, you’ll see that each quadrant has increases on just one side: the increases are at the front edges and on either side of the centre back. I looked through the project images on Ravelry and it seemed that many knitters found the neck a bit snug—they’d added stitches, but I decided to add an entire section. My fifth section is inset into that centre back seam to keep the shawl symmetrical—and to keep it symmetrical, this new section has increases on both sides. The idea was to make the shawl wider but not much deeper, and use up the four skeins.

The pattern has a four-row repeat for the lacy part: I considered those instructions to be for sections one, two, four and five, then did my addition in the middle. If you’re inclined to do this yourself, here’s the pattern stitch for that new section in the middle:

Row 1: K1, YO, K4 [YO2, K2tog, K2tog] to 5 stitches. YO2, K4, YO, K1
Row 3: K1, YO, K2 [YO2, K2tog, K2tog] to 3 stitches. YO2, K2, YO, K1

I cast on 52 (instead of 42) stitches and worked as instructed. I had 212 stitches when it was time to start the lace and 38 stitches between markers.

I did nine repeats of the lace pattern, then cast off. With a gentle block, here’s the result:

Colonnade shawl by Stephen West knit by Deborah Cooke

And a closer view:

I’m really pleased that it didn’t pool, but that’s probably because the number of stitches increases every second row. There’s just 23g of the Wool Clasica left over, so that’s one more gone from my stash.

Here’s my Ravelry project page.

Nightshift Update

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

Nightshift is a gorgeous shawl pattern by Andrea Mowry (Drea Renee Knits). Hers is knit in a beautiful self-striping yarn called Spin Cycle Yarns Dreamscape. It’s an aran weight yarn, though, and I was worried about the shawl ending up like a blanket. I decided to use up some of my Koigu KPPPM, which is a fingering weight, for my Nightshift. Of course, using a thinner yarn means knitting twice as many stitches to make a shawl of decent size. I cast on last July with these skeins.

Nightshift shawl by Andrea Mowry knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke

I’ve blogged about this shawl a couple of times already: Nightshift in Koigu KPPPM and Navellia, Nightshift and Audrey.

I’ve been working on this while sheltering in place, and am making steady progress. It’s not done, but I thought I’d show you today how it’s coming out. Here it is on the needles – it’s big enough that I can’t stretch it out to its full width: Nightshift shawl knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke I’m on the 11th repeat and am hoping to do 15. I’ll see how the yarn lasts.

Here’s a detail shot: Nightshift shawl knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke I like how the colourways mix and mingle with each other, because several of the same reds appear in both my red main colour and several of the contrast ones.

How is your knitting during Covid-19?

Large Rectangle with Center Diamond Pattern

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

Today, we’ll talk about another stole from Victorian Lace Today that I knit (this time in 2008) but never added to the blog. The pattern is Large Rectangle with Center Diamond Pattern by Jane Sowerby and I knit it in a handpainted yarn from Wellington Fibres. The base yarn is their 3-ply fingering.

Wellington Fibres is a small mill and also raise angora goats themselves. They’re near Elora, Ontario and well worth a road trip. They have a shop attached to the mill where they sell both tops for spinning and finished yarn. They have a spring open house, when there are lots of baby goats, too.

Mohair is a glorious fibre with a wonderful sheen. It also takes dye very well. The rich jewel tones of the yarn at Wellington Fibres makes their shop feel like Aladdin’s Cave.

Here’s the shawl:
Diamond Lace Shawl from Victorian Lace Today knit by Deborah Cooke in Wellington Fibres 3 ply This one finished out at 65″ by 19″. I think it was the first time I knitted on a border. I did change out the specified border for the Cyprus edging.

There’s a slight striping effect from the handpainted yarn, but I like it:

Diamond Lace Shawl from Victorian Lace Today knit by Deborah Cooke in Wellington Fibres 3 ply

What I like about the patterns in Victorian Lace Today is that I can memorize many of them, especially ones like this. That means I don’t have to sit over a chart as I knit, but can watch television or talk to other people. I like charted lace patterns, too, but VLT is distinctive in that for me.

Here’s an old picture of the shawl, which shows the pattern stitch a bit better. This one is closer to the actual colours, too. Large Rectangle with Center Diamond Pattern by Jane Sowerby knit in Wellington Fibres 3-ply by Deborah Cooke

Now, I’m thinking about knitting another shawl from Victorian Lace Today!

Alpine Knit Scarf

Posted on March 13, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

Here’s a project from Victorian Lace Today that was never documented on the blog. It’s a wide scarf—really, it’s a stole—and I knit it in Malabrigo Lace in the colourway Whale’s Tale. The pattern is the Alpine Knit Scarf with Double Rose Leaf Center Pattern and Diamond Border by Jane Sowerby.

Alpine Lace shawl from Victorian Lace Today knit in Malabrigo Lace by Deborah Cooke

My finished shawl is about 55″ long and 18″ wide.

There are several interesting details here. One is that photography often reveals colour shifts that aren’t as noticable in real life. Malabrigo Lace, like many handpainted yarns, has colour variations between skeins. I didn’t know anything about alternating skeins when I knit this and you can see, just a little past halfway and to the right, where I changed from one skein to the next. The left skein is a little bluer and the colours in the right skein are a little less blended.

You might also agree with the idea that lace shouldn’t be knit in yarns with color variations because it hides the detail of the lace. I kind of like it.

Here’s a shot of about half of the shawl (the right half above). Even in the handpainted yarn, you can see that this pattern has a border with a central panel in a different lace pattern, and that they’re separated (and edged) with garter stitch. The Malabrigo didn’t really pool in this knit, which was a nice bonus.

Alpine Lace shawl from Victorian Lace Today knit in Malabrigo Lace by Deborah Cooke This is a beautiful pattern and I loved knitting it. Malabrigo Lace is very (very!) soft, too. I would like to knit it again in a more solid colour, just to see the difference.

You can see the pattern stitch a bit better in this older photo:

Alpine Lace Shawl knit by Deborah Cooke

My Ravelry project page says I knit this in 2007! It’s been living in the cedar chest ever since. One of the good things about digging it out for a new photograph is that I’ve kept it out and am (finally) wearing it.

Navelli, Nightshift and Audrey

Posted on September 25, 2019 by Deborah Cooke

I didn’t post about my knitting last week, because I didn’t have anything finished to show you. I’m knitting along on some projects that are taking a while. So, let’s have a progress report today.

You might remember that I was going to frog the stockinette of my Navelli because I didn’t like the way the variegated colourway was pooling. Well, I have a sweater-quantity of a semi-solid Koigu in my stash, and since it’s a generous sweater quantity, I borrowed four skeins from that to use for my Navelli. This colour is working out much better – here it is:

The trick is that now I don’t love the blue in the fair isle section. It matched perfectly with the variegated colourway and is okay with this one. I’m not frogging back again. Que sera sera.

I’ve also been knitting away on my Nightshift shawl in Koigu KPPPM. I showed you the beginning of it here. My plan is to include the red – leftover from my Lunenberg cardigan – as one colour in each stripe. Here’s where I am now:

At this point, I’ve started the sixth repeat of the 20-row pattern sequence. (I’m calling a 20-row repeat a stripe.) The first one has a red background and the lightest purple as contrast. The second repeat has the lightest purple as the background and the red as the contrast colour. The third repeat has the darkest purple as the background and the red as the contrast. The fourth repeat has the middle purple as background with the red as the contrast. The fifth repeat has the red in the background again, and the first purple as the contrast. The sixth repeat (which I’ve just started) has the red in the background and the darkest purple as contrast. It is interesting how the purples, which look so different from each other, are difficult to distinguish from each other once they’re knitted up with the red.

I like this pattern a lot. It’s clever (it has i-cord binding on both edges that is knitted as you go_ and the pattern is easy to memorize. It’s a great way to use up different colourways in the same yarn, which means I’ll probably knit another one (or two).

I’ve also started to spend some time on my Audrey cardigan, which has been waiting on its sleeves for a while. Not only is it a cable pattern, but the dark purple means I need to knit it in daylight to see what the heck I’m doing. I have to have an hour in the afternoon of a sunny day, which doesn’t happen that often. The yarn is fuzzy and sheds – I keep it wrapped in a teatowel, which I spread on my lap when I’m working on it – and it makes my nose tickle a little. (It’s an angora blend, called Rowan Angora Haze. It’s also discontinued.) Here are the sleeves so far:

This yarn is so fuzzy that the camera didn’t know where to focus! The stitch pattern was reasonably easy to memorize but it’s not TV knitting. I put it aside because I thought the sleeves were too wide. I still think they are, even though I’m knitting a smaller size of sleeve. I’ll make them bracelet length and hope that does the trick.

I never showed you the body finished and assembled. Here it is, although I’m not convinced about the buttons yet. They’re a bit sparkly for me – that one is still on the button card.

I think my next project needs to be with thicker yarn!

I also went to the Woodstock Fleece Festival last weekend with a friend, which was a nice yarny fix. It was a beautiful fall day and there were so many vendors with wonderful yarn and fleece. Temptation was everywhere! In the end, I only bought two skeins of yarn – some sock yarn from an indie dyer and a skein of Spin Cycle Yarns Dream State, which I’ve been wanting to squish for a while. It’s actually the specified yarn for Nightshift. I’ll use this skein as the contrast colour on the yoke of a sweater I’m planning – the pattern is Fern & Feather (that’s a Ravelry link) and that ball of purple on the right will be the background colour.

Phew! Lots of purple on my needles. What have you been knitting lately?

Nightshift in Koigu KPPPM

Posted on August 27, 2019 by Deborah Cooke

Nightshift is a shawl pattern by Andrea Mowry, designed to be knit with six colours of a gradient yarn. Two colourways are used at any time, resulting in bands of colour with dots and dashes in the contrasting colour. It’s a striking piece, and quite substantial since the yarn is worsted weight. I cast on with worsted weight yarn but felt that the result was too thick for me to actually wear. I dove into the stash and came up with an alternative – Koigu KPPPM.

Here are my colours: Nightshift shawl by Andrea Mowry knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke

This photo was taken in bright sunlight. The colours are a little deeper than they appear here, and a little less pinky. The red is the leftover from my Koigu Lunenberg cardigan – there are almost four balls (just over 600 yards) of 329P left. This will use it up. (This is one colourway I bought the first year I went to the Koigu tent sale in 2016: the second was the grey mix I’m using in my Juicy Gloss cardigan. If I ever knit the sleeves on that, there probably won’t be much of that colour left.)

Charlotte's Web Shawl by Maie Landra knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke For my contrast for the Nightshift shawl, I chose four purple colourways. In 2017 at the Koigu tent sale, I bought a pack of ten different shades of purple. I knit Charlotte’s Web with five of them – there it is, in progress above, but still have the other five. You can see all of the colours in this photo: two are already knit up in the shawl, with the three balls that I planned to use (and did) lined up on the right. The five skeins below are the ones I have left now. One of them – the far right one – doesn’t go as well with the others, to my thinking, especially when combined with the red. I chose the other four to use with the red for my Nightshift.

This (inevitably) reminds me of the Jenny Joseph poem:
“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple,
with a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.”

I’ve never understood why anyone had to wait to wear red and purple together.

This stash-dive gives me (4 x 160) 640 yards of purples and about 610 yards of red. I’ll knit until it’s gone. The pattern calls for 6 skeins that are 150 yards each, so I have more yardage. This yarn is thinner, though, so I’m hoping the shawl still comes out a good size.

Because Koigu KPPPM is fingering weight, not worsted, as specified in the pattern, I also cast on with smaller needles than specified in the pattern. I’m using 3.75mm. It’s a bit loose, which gives the yarn room to bloom, but I could have used 3.5mm.

Also, the red will appear in every band of colour in my shawl, although it will switch from being the main colour to being the contrast.

Here’s a close-up of my progress so far. Nightshift shawl by Andrea Mowry knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke

The first repeat had a red background and contrast in the lightest purple. The second repeat was inverted – lightest purple background with red contrast. The third repeat, which is almost half done in this picture, has the darkest purple as background and the red as the contrast colour. My project page on Ravelry for this shawl is right here.

How do you like the beginning of my red and purple Nightshift?

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