Hedgerow Shawl MKAL - Finished!

Well, those three weeks (from cast on) sure went quickly.  I did take pictures after each clue, but just never got around to posting/blogging about them.  So, here is Clue 2.

And Clue 3.

It has been a little while since I did a mystery knit along, or anything with lace.  This project is the first lace shawl of the year, not that there is a ton of lace.  But it was a relaxing knit, and it used up some stash.  It is a shawl shape that I like, even if blocking can be a little bit of a challenge.

With the world being all browns, and white when it snowed, I was really craving some color.  The yarn is very soft, and it was nice to work with.  The shawl has nice drape.

Pattern:  Hedgerow Shawl MKAL by Helen Stewart

Yarn:  Round Table Yarns Camelot

Needle:  US 5 (3.75 mm)

Hedgerow Shawl MKAL - Clue 1 Done!

A couple of weeks ago, I was poking around some of the yarn stash in my piano room (don’t ask) and came across three skeins that I had gotten in a club back in 2020.  The club was the Guigemar Yarn Club, and the yarn was Camelot (80% merino/10% cashmere/10% nylon), fingering weight (I have an insane amount of fingering weight yarn in my stash) from Round Table Yarns.  They were each in their own canvas bag, hanging on the door handle, and when I pulled them out and held them together I thought that they would make a nice shawl.

And wasn’t it convenient that Helen Stewart of Curious Handmade was doing a mystery knitalong of a three-color shawl.  I haven’t done a mystery knitalong in a while, although I will often buy the patterns and even a kit (usually from Miss Babs, because I have a hard time resisting those kits!), and then wait until all the clues come out and then maybe cast on at some undetermined point in the future.  Please don’t ask me how many kits I have in my stash.  Those are all project embryos waiting to be born.

Anyway, I felt like knitting something with some brighter colors, and as addictive as colorwork knitting can be, sometimes your brain just isn’t up for it but you still feel like knitting, so I cast on when the first clue came out and actually finished the first clue the day the second clue came out.  The pattern called for a US 6 (4.0 mm) needle, but looking back at the other shawls from her that I’ve knit I typically go down a needle size, so I used a US 5 (3.75 mm) needle.

Pattern:  Hedgerow Shawl MKAL

Yarn:  Round Table Yarns Camelot

Needle:  US 5 (3.75 mm)

Stillness Shawl - Finished!

 

With some focused knitting I was able to finish this shawl up last Wednesday.  The pattern has you work the bind off in color C, but I decided to just continue with color D.  Blocking was a bit of a challenge.

This original pattern is a circular shawl, but I would not have wanted to try to block it as one.  As you can see, mine came out as three-quarters of a circle, which is fine.

Pattern:  Stillness Shawl by Helen Stewart

Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri

Needle: US 5 (3.75 mm)

Stillness Shawl - Halfway There

 

I finished up my test knit last week, so I’m back to focusing on my Stillness Shawl.  I’ve done the last increase, so I now have 577 stitches on my needles.  The rows are simple, but long.  This has been a very easy shawl to modify into a cape.  At this point in the pattern, and since row 100, the extra stitch I have is worked as a k1 for the first pattern repeat.  This makes the pattern symmetrical overall.  I used leftovers from two of my other trio sets (Granny Smith, from an Autumn Trio set and Thyme, from the English Garden Trio) for the Color D stripes.  I am almost out of the the Thyme and searched yesterday for a replacement.  I didn’t really have anything that would work in my leftovers bag, so I checked all of the Kiri in my stash for a suitable color.  I ended up going to my Yule Ombré set.  It turns out that the second skein of that set matches the Thyme exactly so I caked it up yesterday.  If I need more of Color D, I will have to decide if I want to go darker (the third skein) or lighter (the first skein).  I can go either way.  The Granny Smith is darker than the Thyme, so I already have a darker to lighter thing going with Color D.

Pattern:  Stillness Shawl by Helen Stewart

Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri

Needle:  US 5 (3.75 mm)

Stillness Shawl - Cast On!

 

Yesterday I bound off both my Pardalote Shawl and my Goblin Kalari Shawl.  While I was straightening my project bags I came across the three skeins above.  They are the Valentine Trio from The Unique Sheep and they have been in my stash for a while now waiting for the right project.  I looked through my pattern library last night and finally settled on Helen Stewart’s Stillness Shawl.  I thought about doing another Snowmelt but I felt like doing something that I hadn’t knit before.  The Stillness Shawl is a circular shawl, but I’m working it as a circular cape, my standard modification for circular shawls.  For the B color I am not using mohair (can’t stand the stuff), or lace weight.  Instead I am using up some leftovers in the same yarn base.

Pattern:  Stillness Shawl by Helen Stewart

Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri

Needle:  US 5 (3.75 mm)

She Sells Seashells - Finished!

I finished this up over the 4th of July weekend.  I love how it came out.  It is large, and I'm wondering if the next time I knit this I should leave out the extra repeats in the second section.  They do actually lead to a distortion when blocking because the mess up the Pi increase pattern, so the next section before the increase gets stretched out.

You can see what I mean from the blocking picture.  On the other hand, I do like the proportions of the design with my extra repeats.  Because of the way the shaping is affected it also makes the last section ruffly when you wear it, which I like.

I really did this modification the hard way - adding stitches, instead of just adding repeats of the lace pattern.  The result was that when I did the final lace section I did not end up quite symmetric.  Before I knit it again I will go back and revisit that modification.  I'm also going to add in the eyelet row in the first section that appears in the pattern photo, but not in the pattern.

Pattern:  Snowmelt by Helen Stewart
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)

She Sells Seashells - Halfway Point

I'm just over the halfway point and am about to do the last increase row.  I haven't spent as much time on this project over the last 10 days, focusing instead on some of the other many projects that I have on my needles.  I currently have two project bags with four projects in them (two in each bag) sitting by my knitting spot.  And that doesn't count the other project bags I have scattered around.

Pattern:  Snowmelt by Helen Stewart
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)

She Sells Seashells - Done with Color A, for now

When I was knitting this pattern the second time around I discovered that somehow I had worked more repeats of this section than the pattern called for.  It calls for 3 and I had worked 5.  I don't remember why or how, but decided that I liked it so did it again.  Studying the picture of the shawl in the pattern I also noticed that the original has another row of eyelets in the garter stripe section before the increase.  If/when I knit this pattern again I'll add that in.

Pattern:  Snowmelt by Helen Stewart
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)

She Sells Seashells - Second Increase

This photo was taken just before I did the second increase row, effectively doubling my stitch count.  After I did my increase row I counted, just to make sure I had the correct number of stitches, and I was off by 3 stitches.  I went back and looked at my two eyelet rows and discovered that on the second eyelet row I had missed a yarn over, which dropped my stitch count by 1, which meant that I had 170 stitches, instead of 171.  The increase row is supposed to 171 - 6 + 1 = 166 stitches, which would give me 337 stitches total, 331 body stitches and 6 edge stitches, but I only had 328 body stitches, and I needed 2 more stitches on the body to be able to work an even number of repeats of the lace pattern in the next section.  Fortunately the pattern calls for another increase at the beginning and end of the row on the next row, which I had not noticed when I was working my modifications. Before I counted I wasn't going to work those increase, but I ended up working them to make up for my missed stitch.  I may do another increase at the end of my first lace row, just to get my stitch count up to what it is supposed to be for my modifications, and because it makes the beginning and end of the row symmetrical.

Pattern:  Snowmelt by Helen Stewart
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)

She Sells Seashells - Cast On

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)

May Flowers - Finished!

I finished casting this off Sunday morning.  I really like how it came out and may make another one.  I didn't pin it when I was blocking, I just laid it out on the mats and patted it into shape.

I do have a fair bit of yarn left over - the project only used about 238 grams, leaving me about 100 grams leftover.  I'm collecting all of my Kiri leftovers in a bag and will make something with them - maybe a hack on one of Ambah O'Brien's patterns.

Pattern:  Impressionists MKAL by Helen Stewart
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri Spring Trio
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)

May Flowers - Half Way Done

After finishing up my English Garden shawl I immediately cast on May Flowers.  The pattern is the Impressionists MKAL by Helen Stewart.  I actually created a project page back in March, but never got around to choosing my yarn, getting wrapped up instead in a couple of other projects that took priority.  After getting back from Bead & Button and focusing on my English Garden shawl I decided to use my other Spring Trio on the Impressionist shawl, and as my husband will attest, once I decide on something I want to execute.

The colors are, from top to bottom, Wildflowers, Ranunculus and Bluebird Skies.  I really like the speckled Wildflowers skein and the way the pink blends with it while the blue pops.

Pattern:  Impressionists MKAL by Helen Stewart
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri Spring Trio
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)

English Garden - Finished!

Last week I concentrated on finishing up my English Garden shawl, and thanks to coming home early on Wednesday with a migraine I was able to finish it.  Here is a shot of it blocking on my spiffy new gridded blocking mats.

When I got to the final green lace section I discovered that I was short 4 stitches (yes, I do make mistakes, and no, I don't always catch them).  I didn't know at the time what happened (I didn't really try to figure it out, I just counted my stitches noted the discrepancy and kept knitting), but when I was blocking the shawl I found them - four missed yarn overs on the last increase row.  I fudged the lace pattern at the edges to make it work.

Pattern:  Snowmelt Shawl by Helen Stewart
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri - Spring Trio - English Garden
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)

English Garden - Making Progress

This project also took the trip to Bead & Button with me, and I did manage to make some progress on it.  I am now through the A and C color sections and about to start the B and C color section.  I need to get some of my WIPs done as I have some projects that I want to get started on, including some designs of my own.

This is a semi-circular shawl, which I had started on April 2, but then it sat in one of my project bags for two months until I restarted it on June 1, modifying the start to give it a better neckline.  I also modified the cast on.  The pattern called for knitting an I-cord and then picking up stitches in the I-cord, which I thought was just making your point the hard way.  I did an I-cord cast on instead.

I also started out deeper in the shawl, to make the neckline more wearable.  The yarn I am using is one of the Spring Trios from The Unique Sheep.  English Garden on Kiri.

Pattern:  Snowmelt Shawl by Helen Stewart
Yarn:  The Unique Sheep Kiri - Spring Trio - English Garden
Needle:  US 4 (3.5 mm)