?People are asking me for the Paisley Shawl’s pattern source, why/how I blocked it and final dimensions.

As I’ve mentioned before, the center part of the shawl up to and including the wide paisley border is Evelyn A. Clark’s?"Paisley Shawl" from the Spring 2005 edition of Interweave Knits. The outer border, including the double column of eyelets joining it to the shawl’s body is original. I’ve shared both the process I used to noodle it out and the final pattern here on String. The yarn I used was Helen’s Lace from Lorna’s Laces. My shawl, including my additional edging took about 80% of my skein. There’s enough left over for (perhaps) a small lacy ascot or scarflet.

I used US #5 needles, starting on DPNs, but quickly moving to first two circs employing standard two-circ methods, then one circ when I had enough stitches to go around the circumference of one. I could have kept on going using the two-circ method, but I’m not a big fan of multiple dangling needle ends, and the fine lace yarn was easy to manage even after the shawl grew larger than the circumference of the one needle. I worked the edging on one DPN and one point of the same circ that was holding the bulk of the shawl’s stitches. It took me less than a month to make the entire thing, including designing the companion edging. I’d say I did about two weeks of casual knitting of about an hour a day, plus five days of intensive vacation knitting (three or four hours per day).

Blocking

I did a quick and dirty block. I didn’t even use any pins. Instead of running the wires at the base of the edge triangles then pinning each one out separately (the thorough way), I opted for a less labor intensive method.

First, I gently hand-washed the shawl. While there was some minor bleeding of magenta into the wash water, the piece’s colors didn’t muddy or change, and there was no bleeding onto the blocking towels. Then I laid out my towels and threaded the points of the damp piece onto the blocking wires. I made sure never to run the wires under just one thread. Instead I was careful to pick up the entire point-end stitch. Then I teased the wires into a square, using the friction of the wet wool on the terrycloth towels to hold the wires in place. The whole thing took maybe two hours to dry, tops.

The down side to my quick and dirty method is that my basic saw-tooth edging was distorted a bit, and the points ended up (mid-block, anyway) looking a bit more like equilateral triangles than the shark-fin shape they’re supposed to have. For the record, I do note that as the points relaxed post-block, they reverted a bit to their native shape.

Yes, if this were a more important piece I’d have done a more meticulous job of blocking. But for the purposes of this project, my approach was good enough. The final (relaxed, post-block) dimensions are about 40"x40" (120cm square).

Lessons Learned

This started as a special request gift – a lace shawl of a size practical for regular winter wear with a jacket, preferably in purples and blues. I found the yarn and tried to force it around a pattern I had wanted to do for a while. While the pattern looked great and the yarn looked great, they didn’t work together. ?Conclusion – If I want to use it for some sort of lace, unless a hand-dyed or multicolor yarn has extremely short or extremely long color runs, I’m better off sticking to a texture pattern that’s mostly solid ground pierced by eyelets.

The two-circ method can be used for flat pieces knit around their circumference in addition to being used to knit tube-based items. Absolutely. Worked great. This wasn’t the first time I’d tried this. My Waterspun Kids’ Poncho also used two circs, but as I was working that – even though it was mesa-land flat – my mind was thinking "poncho = tapered tube," and not "poncho = tablecloth with hole in center." One caveat – the corner where the needles meet is just as stressed as a corner where two DPNs meet. Perhaps more, as the long lengths of the two stitch-loaded circs can lever themselves into all sorts of odd configurations and apply more force to that juncture than can two short DPNs. Care needs to be taken that the stitches at the needle junctions aren’t distorted. This is especially true if there are YOs involved.

Not every project needs to be executed with the fanaticism of a full-bore perfectionist. You may disagree or you may scoff, but for me – this was a valuable lesson. I tend to over-agonize about my knitting. Sometimes I end up squeezing all the fun out along the way. I decided that this project was for pure relaxation. The pattern was very simple, and required very little thought on my part to execute. Even the edging wasn’t that hard to noodle out. In fact, writing it up for String took more time and thought than did working it. There are some mistakes in the thing that I didn’t catch until much later, but I didn’t rip back and start again. I didn’t agonize over blocking either. All in all this one was easy, fast, and very relaxing. So I repeat the most valuable thing I learned from the whole thing: Not everything is an heirloom. Just have fun.

Thanks to the sixth (seventh?) cool, rainy weekend in a row, the paisley shawl has been blocked. Here it is on the blocking wires atop a pile of towels on my bedroom rug::

The strange blue triangles behind it are the printed sides of my beach towels. I wasn’t as neat about putting them down as I should have been. This flash shot also kills the colors somewhat. They’re brighter and more varied than this washed out photo shows.

You can see the paiselys, the quad-flower eyelts in teh piece’s center, and that each pint bears the same quad-flower. I also like the way the diagonals from the center are echoed by the edging’s join. I think it worked, even if my photography skills are too lame to document it well:

Now you can see why the thing reminded me of a bandanna. It’s got the same sort of all-over patterned center, with a bold paisley border all around the edges:

I did the first corner last night. It worked out more or less as I expected. My last motif ended within a stitch or two of the corner (I think I overlooked a couple of the K2tog-psso spots, otherwise it would have ended up exact). I then worked an extra repeat squashed into the three cornermost stitches, fudging the attachment points. You can see that the base of that repeat is slightly thickened, but that’s not very obvious.

The squish-stretch around the corner accounts for the oddly leggy appearance of the double yarn over column. Most of that should even out in blocking. Now all that’s left to do is to carry on and finish the remaining 2.75 sides. Maybe on the next lacy project I knit I’ll work out how to do mitered corners. That sounds like fun, too.

More questions:

Why do you do the K2tog-psso bit when joining?
Because the stitches are wider than the rows are tall, and I’m working my edging perpendicular to the direction in which the body was knit (that was done center-out). I need to even out that ratio just a tad as I go along. If I were to join my edging with K2s only (remember, that means one edging stitch joined to one body stitch) the edging would be more stretched around the perimeter and I’d get more cupping of the interior piece. Another way to even everything out is to knit the functional equivalent of short-rows in the edging, making free rows every now and again that aren’t attached to the body. I do this if the edging is VERY wide or unstretchy compared to the body, but it wasn’t necessary for this little bit.

What makes a hand-dyed multicolor yarn work in a lace project?
I wish I could say that I know a flat-out answer to this one. All I can do is report on what I look for. First, the color set should be tonally close, like an impressionist’s palette. Big contrast makes it much more difficult. Second, (surveying my scars from the Birds Eye experiment), the color has to take the center stage, not the lacy pattern. I now look for something that has acres of ground punctuated by lacy bits if I’m using a multicolor. And third, the more broken the color patterning or shorter the repeat, the more it fights with the texture pattern. This particular skein sort of pooled a bit. Stripers pool even more so. Too much pooling however can overwhelm any pattern. But even those yarns can be tamed. The feather and fan or old shale variants are especially forgiving, and can often be used for savagely aggressive multicolors that fight with any other texture.

Finally for hand-dyeds of all gauges, skeins with very short color splotches that make a tweedy appearance when knit up are the most difficult to use in combo with a texture pattern. Those I prefer to use either in plain stockinette, or in combo with an coordinating or accent color.

Do you like garter stitch based lacy patterns?
To be truthful, I prefer the look of a stockinette ground for solid color lacy work. But garter works well for this particular pattern and with this multicolor yarn. Garter stitch breaks up pooling colors and tames hand-dyed yarns because the garter ridges introduce the color of a later row into a previous one, blurring the boundaries between hues.

As promised, here’s a picture. I’m working it on one too-small in diameter US #5 circular needle. The fine yarn and airiness of the relatively large stitches make it easy to cram all the stitches onto the needles – hence the odd looking snood-like object below:

Not having my needle cache at my disposal, I started this piece with two #5 circs borrowed from my mother. I used them in the same manner as working socks on two circs until the piece got large enough, then transferred it to one circ. I’ll probably go back and use two (or possibly four) circs later in production as it grows even bigger.

In the mean time, you can see the center of the piece, the four radiating lines of YO, K1, YO, plus some of the flower-shaped eyelet sets. You can also see the play of color in my berry-hued hand-dyed better than in the jumble produced by the same yarn used for the Birds Eye pattern:

This piece is going much quicker than Birds Eye. For starters, as a true lace texture design there’s something happening on every row of that pattern. The Paisley is lacy knitting rather than lace knitting, in that every other row is worked without increases or decreases. In this case, they are done in purl to yield the garter stitch texture.

So far the Paisley has been quite easy to follow. The flower eyelet area is a repeat with only four simple rows to memorize (the other four being purls). The large size #5 needles make the work grow especially quickly. So far I’ve found no problems with the pattern, although I admit I started it slightly differently than described. Instead of the crochet cast-on in the directions, I used an I-cord beginning (one row of four-stitch I-cord, one row of K1, YO, one row of all knits, then plunge into the pattern from the point where it begins with 8 stitches total). I did this because my mom didn’t have any crochet hooks of suitable size. I am finding that Paisley is also more economical in terms of yarn consumption than was Birds Eye. At the progress points shown in the photos, both shawls have consumed roughly the same amount of yarn. The Paisley is a square approximatley 26 inches across (without stretching or blocking); the Birds Eye was a triangle measuring about 12 inches from the bottom point to the needles. I didn’t measure how wide it was though.

Because it’s been such easy sailing so far (even with my variant cast-on), I’d recommend this pattern to people who are looking for a center-out lace shawl pattern – even for a first lacy project, provided they feel comfortable knitting from charts. Also because it’s going so quickly, I’ll probably finish this piece off before returning to Rogue.