We have a new shawl pattern up! This is a pretty solid textured triangle, with enough interesting features to make an engaging project, even though there’s nothing especially technically difficult.
Here’s the link: link.
It is called Toast Triangle Shawl, because the original name was too generic! I am not sure this one is better! But I think it fits pretty well.
Where we last left off, I was posting at a great rate of 3 posts per month! Unfortunately, this was in November.
There’s a lot to promote! The most recent new knitting pattern .PDF is Blocky.
(Nothing came up when I searched for a knit design called Blocky. So I published Blocky. When I went to add my own projects to Blocky, there was another Blocky, but it was very different to mine.)
Here is mine:
You can knit this project at least two ways: as a shawl, or as a cowl. Finishing for either one is pretty easy, and although I went with the cowl option, I felt that wet blocking took away a lot of the bouncy wool-yarn vitality of the thing, if that’s not too strange a thing to say. Garter stitch grows, but it also felt like it went kind of flat on me and I preferred the unblocked version pretty strongly.
For my second project, I’m doing the shawl (or trying to get close; I am having to kind of play fast and loose with yarn requirements and will probably end up with something a little different to what I had in mind color-wise) in a two-ply non-superwash wool, in hopes it kind of keeps more of the loft and bounce. The yarn I used in the cowl sample is one of my all-time favorites (Malabrigo Sock), but it’s just not quite as satisfying here as it is usually.
The photo above doesn’t show much—just yarn—but it’s probably the best yarn photo I’ve taken all year. There’s about five minutes of really nice light in this little alcove in the afternoon in January, apparently.
Anyway, there’s also Revenge of Pup Patch Hat and Cowl in this series. Please check them out if you’re interested or like mitered squares (these aren’t mitered squares, but they’re kind of mitered-square adjacent in some ways).
Something new is up over on Ravelry:
Mina Shawl! Obvious reference, slightly questionable taste (I only knew Dracula from pop culture and memes before this year; I did not expect Mina to be so affecting as a character)!
The colors on this one were inspired directly from some speckled and solid Malabrigo Arroyo I was working with for a sweater pattern. There wasn’t really enough left from the skeins I had to get the effect I wanted, but I really liked how the speckled combined with the more traditional hand-dyed yarn. Lazy gradient, kind of.
Anyway this is the best shawl I’ve come up with in a long time. It might be the full-on best, but I’ve also been looking back through my photos, and now I think some of my other ideas were stronger than they felt at the time. (I took a screenshot for a joke about a video game—it’s very important that I find this and actually post the joke somewhere—but this was around the time of Conduit Cowl and Iteration, and those are a lot nicer than I remember.)
I have a lot to do this month: either I update the Sample Shop page here for the upcoming winter holidays, or I don’t; I have a lot of upcoming design projects I’m excited about; I want to knit little animals for the kids. (It’s a whole weird thing. I’m still excited when I can afford to buy a cool present; I want to buy Lego; and yet kids have started to specifically request knitted things. It’s perplexing but not all bad, and also not all good, since it is very hard to knit a 4-foot-long caterpillar and have it turn out well. I should’ve just learned to crochet and done a space millipede from Projectarian. Mine’s okay, but it’s not a space millipede, so it feels like a missed opportunity.)
The title is misleading clickbait. There are no dinosaur bones in this post. I am not really even sure why past-me thought that was a useful heading. Was it going to be about dinosaur bones? I cannot remember.
I haven’t actually posted about any of the recent design projects! I haven’t posted for July!
The main Summer Kitchen (well, loosely: Summer Kitchen has become home decor/organization/housewares in general, and wool boxes are maybe not kitchen-related specifically) project is Little Boxes. (The one above is shown pre-felting. It gets its shape from the yarn it’s holding, but after felting, this particular sample didn’t get as small as the others I’ve done in the same yarn—one even from the same skein. I probably need to up the agitation.) There are some others in the works, but it’s probably going to feel too early to talk about them up until the last minute.
Isurus is the latest shawl. I haven’t been this excited about a shawl in a while, but this was pretty rewarding to design & knit, and finally got me using the fancy Hedgehog Fibres yarn I’ve been holding on to for two years. Two years!
That’s probably going to be it for July, since it’s the 30th now and all. Cheers!
(This shawl pattern is from May 2019; it’s a writeup on how to work what is essentially a very simple diagonal-triangle shawl.)
Gather up your soft yarn scraps, coordinate the colors, and get ready for an easy go-anywhere knit! This bias-knit garter stitch shawl consists of two extremely simple lines of instruction, and about three stitches total. It’s a free knitting pattern, though it’s simple enough that you might think of it more as a recipe. Either way, I hope you enjoy!
The Garter Scrap Shawl can be knit in any yarn, at any gauge.
My sample is shown in worsted weight, mostly Malabrigo Yarns Washted and Rios, in part because the surplus of loosely-related yarns and colorways left over from the Dog Days series is really what inspired this project. But it would look brilliant in light sock yarns, too, and a finer-gauge project might make a better travel knit.
Materials:
Gauge:
Gauge is the great unknowable. You can knit this at any gauge; please choose needles that give you a fabric you like with the yarn you’re using. Gauge in the sample shown is 16 sts and 36 rows in garter stitch before blocking.
Measurements:
Knit until shawl reaches desired measurements. Sample measurements are shown in the schematic below.
Abbreviations used:
k—knit
m1r—make 1 right.
p—purl
(I really wasn’t joking; there are three stitches, if you count the increase as a stitch.)
RS/WS—right side, wrong side.
sl1–slip one. Sts are generally slipped purlwise unless otherwise specified.
st/s—stitch, stitches
Begin Work.
Using the cable cast-on method, CO 4 sts.
Row 1 (RS). sl1, k remaining.
Row 2 (WS). sl1, p1, k remaining.,
Row 3. sl1, k to last 2 sts, m1r, k2 (1 st inc) 5 sts.
Repeat Rows 2 & 3 until shawl reaches desired size, finishing with a completed WS row. The bindoff edge is going to be long. Please make sure you have enough yarn left to work the basic bindoff: sl1, k1, psso, [k1, pass previous st over] until all sts have been consumed. Weave in ends and block lightly.
Gratuitous Notes:
There are lots of other ways to use your yarn scraps—you could use about 3.25 full skeins of Malabrigo Washted in coordinating colors, use this formula as the base for a temperature shawl, or knit it from a big skein of handspun.
Okay, so that’s it!
Spokey Shawl is now live! I’m planning bonus content for it—an additional repeat, planned so that the entire knit takes around ~2-3 balls of soft sock yarn (probably 900-1200 total required yards)—which will be available at a later date.
First business: there’s a new shawl in town, if by ”new shawl” you mean ”downloadable .PDF of the shawl design written as a pattern so you can make your own,” and by “town” you mean ”on my Ravelry page.”
It’s called Iteration. It ends up being a pretty rewarding project; I think the unique shape makes it very wearable. It can be folded in half to wear like a triangle-ish shawl, over the shoulders, but it expands into a hexagon.
Second order of business is increased cost of living and how it is starting to be felt, oh no!
For the time being, I’m keeping .PDF pricing where it is despite inflation. This is probably going to have to change eventually, but for the next 3-4 weeks, I’m hoping to just adjust the nature of my promos and sales a little and see if that allows some room. In the meantime, if you feel like stocking up on patterns, having them remain at the same price point while COL goes up means they’re virtually on sale.
I feel like I’ve been getting nothing done lately, but wait! Behold!
The thing on the left is done. It’s off the needles. It’s even been finished, completely—in this case, felted/fulled.* I’m pretty excited about the result. As I come back to this post in drafts, not only is the first sample finished—but there’s also a second sample done, and the pattern is available.
There’s also a new shawl pattern out! It’s a circle, and it ended up being pretty interesting. The stitches are simple, and showcase yarns with long color transitions. Good as a fairly big shawl; I think it would also work as a baby blanket. (I may end up sending off my latest shawl and blanket samples to babies in the extended family; I am not sure.)
This is probably the last shawl I’ll post in 2020. The yarn is very nice: Beach Bunny World Traveler.
Gopher is available now on Ravelry!
It’s got a little in common with Manta, in that it uses a similar exploded-shape concept (Manta is a kind of broken square; this is a kind of wrecked rectangle, I guess). The slightly weird shape lends itself well to wearing; there are a couple of ways to style it that I’ve found so far, just trying to get photos of the finished shawl.
I worked a second test/sample in worsted-weight cotton blend, and while my final gauge is to be determined, my yardage was very different—a little over 500 yards rather than just under 455–so if you’re going to play yarn chicken, be careful. Maybe yarn chicken is not advised at all for this; I am not sure.
The Mouse Army Knitting Co. 