Shelda's Adventures with Lace

The two-year old swatch

I've long been fascinated with the shaping of Faroese shawls. One of the unique attributes of these traditional shawls is that their shaping allows them to stay on the shoulders of the wearer. I was first introduced to Faroese shawls in Bundanaurriklaedid, translated from the Faroese by Marilyn van Keppel (I ordered this from Schoolhouse Press). Myra Stahman was also fascinated by this shaping, but didn't like the traditional construction of starting the shawl from the bottom. She was also interested in expanding the possibilities for the lace in these shawls beyond the garter-stitch based lace of the originals. She published Stahman's Shawls and Scarves, which includes top-down, stockinette-based lace adaptations of the Faroese shawls (and her lovely Seaman's Scarves). Schoolhouse Press also has this book in their lace section.

My mother requested a white shawl with a very open, lacey pattern. Since wool doesn't really come in "white," I spent a good bit of time collecting various yarns. She didn't want anything that could be considered beige, or worse, yellow (personal preference there)! After some searching I found a bleached white yarn from Skacel, "Merino Fine." When I next saw my mother, I presented her with a basket of yarns I had been collecting as possibilities. I was "saving the best for last" because I was pretty sure this would be the yarn she'd choose, and I started pointing out the various other yarns, holding them up for her to see. I'd set the Merino Fine aside, and finally she said, with just a hint of exasperation, "But what about that one?!" She had of course seen it immediately and her decision was already made. Only problem was that I hadn't knitted with a yarn that fine. I didn't really realize it was a problem until I started swatching!

I decided that I wanted to knit a shawl like those in Myrna's book, but none of them was exactly what I had in mind (I seem to have a genetic inability to exactly follow any pattern). I studied the patterns and charts in the book carefully and began to see that the central requirement for the patterns Myrna included for her shawls was that the lace be a diamond shape, framed by YOs. I started looking in all my lace books for diamonds, and found a whole list of possibilities. More looking, more thinking, and I decided that I would try and adapt Marianne Kinzel's "Springtime" design, p 83-89 of Kinzel's First Book of Modern Lace Knitting. The pattern in the book is a square tablecloth, but I think the diamond can easily be adapted to one of Myrna's shawls. The diamonds flow nicely in a triangle shape for the sides, the lace looks wonderful knit from the top down, the pattern is charted (and from all accounts error free), and there's a very pretty edging included. What could be better?! ;)

So with gratitude to both Myrna Stahman and Marianne Kinzel, I started swatching. I had to go down to a 3.25 mm needle to get the tension I wanted, and I at first found the going quite difficult. As I got further along in the swatch it stopped feeling quite so strange, but I still wasn't sure how it was going to look when I got to the blocking stage. It was rather a crinkly undistinguished mass before I blocked the swatch. But block it I did, and I'm quite happy with it.

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Sadly enough, most of this entry was posted to the Knitted-Lace list back in June of 2001! And I've done nothing further on the shawl since then. Time to get on with it, wouldn't you say?! ;)