shawl – Colourful Designs by Bex Hopkins

Group Made Wedding Shawls

3 September 2014 by Bex

It’s always lovely when a member of our Stitch & B’ch group gets married or has a baby. We usually make something as a group or the few of us who know her best, make a blanket or shawl. Early this year we found out one of the newest knitters in our group, Cat, was getting married and she knew what she wanted to knit for her wedding and what she wanted help with.

It was so good to have guidance, sometimes we make something as a surprise without much understanding of what the person might want. Cat wanted us to knit a special shawl to match the accessories for her wedding dress. The yarn was Superwash Merino/Cashmere/Nylon in 4ply/fingering weight which I dyed a warm grey.

Cat chose the lovely Elizabeth Zimmermann 100th Anniversary Camping Half Circle Shawl (which is available for free on Ravelry) for us to knit for her. This went swimmingly with each of us taking it home for a week or two to complete a section and bringing it back to the group for someone to carry on. It blocked out to a lovely size for Cat to wear on her big day.

The lace for this shawl is really pretty and deserves some close ups, the edging is really lovely. You can find all the project details here.

Cat also wanted to knit a shawl for her bridesmaid and decided to pick the Dew Drops Shawl pattern I wrote a few years ago. Those of you who have knitted it will know it’s not best suited to a new knitter who hasn’t really done lace. But she was brave!
Cat did amazing work knitting her way through hundreds of metres of lace weight yarn in stocking stitch, realising that the lace would take her until well after the wedding to finish and with lots of other things to do for the wedding she handed over the shawl to some other members of our group. They worked their magic and with 2 weeks to go before the wedding it came to my turn to work the last chart and cast off and block. I was quite excited, it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to knit some lace and even longer since I’ve knitted a Dew Drops shawl.

The first thing I did was weigh the remaining yarn, when the scales said 50g you could have knocked me over with a feather. We needed more than another 14 rows to make this into a good sized shawl!

I started adding an extra repeat of chart 4 and 5, this pattern is totally customisable on size and my triangular shawl calculator makes it easy to know how many rows you can knit your remaining yarn. It does all the maths for you! My finger marks where the knitting was at when it was passed to me, with 50% of the yarn remaining, so it would have been quite small and a waste of the lovely coloured yarn.

A few days and 40grams of yarn later, not to mention 3 hours of casting off, I had this crumpled mess. The Dew Drops Shawl with it’s circle of lace with reverse stocking stitch looks pretty awful unblocked and I’d almost forgive someone who frogged at this point.

After blocking I’m sure you will agree it is worth the effort! I’m sorry these last two photos are so poor, the tremor in my hands was pretty bad when I took them!
You can see how much it grew with the blocking too!

Ta Da!!

Next time I can hopefully share some great summer holiday knitting photos with you.

Teyla Shawl

7 October 2012 by Bex

The unusual construction forms a semi circular shawl which hangs comfortably over your shoulders, with a textured stitch pattern and 5lace panels. Knitted from the nape of the neck outwards in one piece with easy resizing options included. Charted instructions.

Irokezka's Teyla Shawl — Knitted and photographed by Irokezka ©.

Requires 4ply/fingering weight yarn – 625metres for the Shawlette size or 1000m for the Shawl size. It will look lovely in any weight yarn.

Teyla Shawl is the second shawl pattern I have self published.
It’s construction was a little different from the hundreds of triangular shawls and I think the textured stitch makes a lovely change from stocking stitch for the body.
The design came from paging through Barbara Walker Treasury’s, then modifying 2 lace patterns to meet my needs for the shawl. I wanted something that only had lace on the right side rows, with the wrong side rows being just purl.
Teyla Shawl came to fruit quickly and with the help of some lovely pattern testers and a tech editor it is now available for Ravelry Download.

Odd Shaped Shawl Calculator

7 September 20164 March 2011 by Bex

Here’s a little way to calculate the maximum number of rows you can work on a shawl (top down shawls only). You need to have knitted at least 20% of your yarn to do get an accurate answer, it will give you a result as long as you have used more than 10% though.

Odd Shaped shawl
This calculation will work for any shawl pattern that starts at the top and has a consistent rate of increases along the length. (ie. 8increases in 9 rows out of 30 = ( ( 8 * 9) /30 ) = 2.4sts per row)
(ie Teyla Shawl)
The yarn usage and stitches per row won’t be as exact for some patterns, Teyla for example increases every row for several rows, then not at all for several more. So the Stitches per Row and Maximum number of rows will only be truly accurate if they fall on a pattern repeat.
I could alter the script so that you enter the pattern repeat length and it only gives answers for full repeats, but it probably isn’t worth the effort. (Please comment if you think that would be more helpful.)
(Use my triangular shawl calculator for regular triangular shawls like Ishbel, Aeolian, Laminaria, Traveling woman, Gail, Dew Drops, Danish Ripple, etc)

You need to know:

Number of starting stitches: (e.g. Teyla – 33, this is usually how many you cast on.)

Increase rate: (average number of stitches increased per row, (total number of increases within the repeat divided by number of rows in the repeat. e.g. Teyla – 2.4 )

Total yarn weight: (This is the total amount of yarn you have available for the project, works best in grams.)

Used yarn weight used so far: (This is the total minus what you have left un-knitted, works best in grams.)

Number of Rows worked so far:

RESULT:
Maximum Number of Rows:

This result is the number of rows you can work with the yarn you have available, it allows you 3rows worth of yarn to cast off which is sufficient for a very stretchy bind off.
If you pattern has a lot of increases in the final few rows, ie lots of yarn over’s for a pointier edge you will need to subtract a few more rows to allow for that.
If your pattern tells you to cast off with the yarn held double you will need to subtract a few more rows to allow for this.

These other bits of information maybe useful/interesting for you.
Total Number of Stitches in the Last Row:

Total Number of stitches worked so far:

Maximum Number of stitches you can work altogether:

This Calculator requires javascript to be enabled.
I hope you find this page useful, I provide it free for everyone, please link to it here.
Contact me through Raverly, or email me if you have any questions.
P.s. Don’t blame me if the answer doesn’t work out for you, I provide this script working to the best of my knowledge, free to everyone.
(c) Bex Hopkins 2010, please do not attempt to steal this script.
If you would like to know how this is calculated please contact me.

Triangular Shawl Calculator

17 January 202114 July 2010 by Bex

Here’s a little way to calculate the maximum number of rows you can work on a shawl (top down shawls only). You need to have knitted at least 20% of your yarn to do get an accurate answer, though it will return a result with more than 10% yarn used.

Triangular shawl
This calculation will work for any shawl pattern that starts at the top and has a consistent number of increases in each row. (ie. 4 increases on every right side row and 2 sts on every wrong side row, or 4increases every other row.)
(Examples of this type of shawl are: ‘Swallowtail’, ‘Ishbel’, ‘Aeolian’, ‘Kiri’, ‘Traveling Woman’, My ‘Dew Drops’ & ‘Danish Ripple’ Shawls)
(I know these shawls have slightly different shapes, but trust me the maths works for all of them.)

You need to know:

Number of Constant stitches in each row: (eg. Swallowtail: 5, Ishbel: 7, Aeolian: 5 or 7.) (usually edge stitches on each side + centre stitch) (If you don’t know this don’t worry too much as it doesn’t make a huge difference to the result.)

Total yarn weight: (This is how much yarn you have available for the project, in grams is best.)

Used yarn weight so far: (This is the total weight of yarn minus what you have left un-knitted.)

Rows worked so far: (with many shawl you can count the number of holes running up the middle next to the centre st and x2).

RESULT
Maximum Number of Rows:

This result is the number of rows you can work with the yarn you have available, it allows you 3rows worth of yarn to cast off which is sufficient for a very stretchy bind off.
If you pattern has a lot of increases in the final few rows, ie lots of yarn over’s for a pointier edge you will need to subtract a few more rows to allow for that.
If your pattern tells you to cast off with the yarn held double you will need to subtract a few more rows to allow for this.

This calculator requires javascript to be enabled.
I hope you find this page useful, I provide it free for everyone, please link to it here.
Contact me through Raverly, or email me if you have any questions.
P.s. Please don’t blame me if the answer doesn’t work out for you, I provide this script working to the best of my knowledge, free to everyone.
(c) Bex Hopkins 2010, please do not attempt to steal this script.
If you would like to know how this is calculated please contact me.

Handspun Swallowtail Shawl

18 July 200917 July 2009 by Bex

From 200grams of Organic Merino ‘Tea and Roses’ Club fibre to 600m of handspun yarn to 4ft6 Swallowtail shawl.

2ply yarn, spun worsted on my Ladybug, final yarn between 4ply and sport weight.

I only got my first wheel in January this year, and I managed to spin, ply, knit and block this shawl in just 13days, as part of my Tour de Fleece spinning challenge.

Pictures 🙂