Incognito Shawl

ERRATA: Cast on should read 188 sts

 

You will need:

Plump DK:
3 x Main Colour (shown in Blueberry Muffin), 1 x each of the four contrast colours: shown in Gooseberry Fool (A), Pistachio Ice Cream (B), Rhubarb Crumble (C), Marshmallow (D)
5mm circular needles at least 80cm long 
A PDF copy of the pattern which you can buy from the tab above
Plump DK, which you can buy from here or the links above 

Finished Measurements: 124cm x 88cm

Tension: 21 ½ stitches and 34 rows to 10cm (4”) over slip stitch pattern

 So confession time; I’m not really a shawl person.  Nothing wrong with them (obviously), and I just love the shawls that other people design and knit.  They are works of art and also extremely practical items to wear.  The reason for my shawl-aversion?  Simply lack of stamina. There are just too many stitches to be knitted!  I’m just so incredibly easily distracted that I will never manage to finish a shawl that has a gazillion stitches in the final rows… just thinking about it makes me feel a bit queasy.

As you can see though, this does look a tiny bit like a shawl.   That is because, I thought, age 48, I really ought to pull myself together and give it a go… my children are starting to leave the nest and soon I’m going to have loads of time on my hands and will be begging for extremely complicated shawl patterns with ludicrous numbers of stitches to take my mind off their empty beds… 

So, I thought I’d start with a design that importantly starts at the longest point with the stitches decreasing so that I didn’t lose hope.  Also, and probably more importantly, this shawl uses our lovely thick Plump DK yarn so there aren’t a silly number of stitches at any point.  So, if you have a shawl phobia like me, then this could be your cure.  Hopefully it will go some way to helping. 

 

A little note about the construction:
To reduce the amount of finishing for the shawl, all the edgings are knitted with the main body of the garment so there is nothing to add once you’ve finished.  To enable this, you will need to have two balls of the main colour on the go at once.  One (MC2) will only be used for the four-stitch edging at the left hand side of the shawl.  If you don’t do this you’ll quickly discover that the MC is at the wrong end of your work half the time which is a little inconvenient!  It will be in use for the whole knit and handily, one ball is plenty for this edge.  It’s slightly annoying having an extra ball on the go, but not as annoying as having to add an i-cord or some other edging at the end. 

The colourwork is all slip stitched so no stranding which, let’s face it, is a relief!

Enough preamble; here goes.