Almost exactly a year ago I knit the Snowmelt shawl by Helen Stewart. I knit mine out of a Spring Trio dyed up by Laura of The Unique Sheep. The set was called English Garden, so that is what I called my shawl. I'm not a big fan of semi-circular shawls as I don't find them quite as wearable as I would like. Before I knit the shawl I did play with the idea of turning it into a full circle cape, and even started a spreadsheet to make the modifications, but figuring out how to shorten the pattern so that you can still work it with three skeins is tricky until you've actually knit one and tracked the yarn usage. I suppose I could have just found two more skeins in my stash that would have worked with my original three, but oddly enough that thought did not occur to me at the time. One modification that I did make to my Snowmelt, and a modification I will try to make to any other semicircular shawls I knit, is to create a neck opening instead of having the top edge flat. I finally wore my English Garden shawl to work this past week and was pleased with how wearable it actually was. It still left too much of my front uncovered, but it stayed in place well, and I was able to pull the bottom edge around when I needed just a little more warmth. I also discovered that I really liked the texture and the overall design. Here is a front shot of my English Garden.
One of the things that I realized when I was wearing the shawl was that I really didn't need to make a full circle cape. I really just needed to add enough stitches to close the gap at my neck, and let the design do the rest. When I got home from work I pulled up my spreadsheet and got to work. One of the things that I do with Helen Stewart's patterns is pull the tables from her pattern into Excel and add in the instructions that she has left out. I don't understand why she goes to the trouble of creating the table and then leaves out the row instructions, especially as she goes to the trouble of putting in the [RS], [WS] indications. It just makes no sense to me, so I put the tables into Excel, fill in the missing information and then export them to PDF so I can pull them into knitCompanion. When I did this pattern last year I also did the modification to the neckline - an I-Cord cast on. I measured the neck on my shawl and figured out how many more inches I needed. Then I calculated my stitch gauge from my finished shawl and figured out how many stitches I needed to cast on. I then went through the table and filled in the stitch counts as appropriate for the increases called for in the pattern. The last thing I had to do was check the lace patterns. I looked at the charts to determine the repeat stitch count and noticed that with my new stitch counts I had just 1 extra stitch to account for, as opposed to the 7 extra stitches in the original. That was an easy thing to fix. I updated the lace instructions and was ready to go.
For this version I decided to use another Trio, I think this was a Summer Trio, called Shell Collecting.
I caked up my skeins and cast on yesterday afternoon while we watched the 2018 Star is Born (a wonderful movie, although the story is sad). I wasn't sure how the colors were going to play together. The skeins are numbered 1-3, from left to right in the picture, but I'm using them in reverse order, so skein 3 is color A, skein 2 is color B and skein 3 is color C. So far I like how it is coming together. I will probably still run short on yarn, and may have to shorten a section or two, unless I decide to stash dive and find another color that will go with my trio. Or maybe I'll use some of the leftovers from my English Garden...
Pattern: Snowmelt by Helen Stewart
Yarn: The Unique Sheep Kiri
Needle: US 4 (3.5 mm)
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