The Meaningful Stitch - Episode 15 - All The Shawls

hello there and welcome to the meaningful stitch this is episode 15 and i'm amy palko i'm coming to you from edinburgh scotland and this is my digital home from home a place where i get to share with you my knitting practice and my knitting projects and we're almost amazingly at 5 000 subscribers here so i think we're just maybe 14 below 5 000 which is honestly just absolutely incredible so if you do enjoy the content that you find here please do feel free to subscribe i'd love to have you along for this journey okay so if you have been watching for a wee file you will know that at the start of each of my episodes i like to draw a card and today's card i've drawn from this really lovely oracle deck i was gifted for my birthday last year and it's called the we star oracle reclaiming self and it's by trisha murray and this is the one that i drew for us for today isn't it beautiful the divine spark at the core of your very being wants to be seen unmasked unshrouded allowed to shine brilliant and strong this is who you truly are so a beautiful invitation to shine our light i just love that message and i hope you do too okay i have so much knitting to share with you and so much yarny goodness that i am absolutely surrounded here so but i'm going to start with what i'm wearing so again if you have watched this before you might recognize this this is the starting point by hokie lochitelli it was a mystery knittalong and you were told kind of what colors you know a bit of color guidance to to help you choose which yarn to to knit it in it's always quite difficult with the mystery knit along to make your yarn choices when you don't really know the placement of the colours and you don't know what the overall look is going to be and so my friend and i decided that we were going to try our hand at some dyeing and so we dyed up some yarn and i knitted up the starting point so you start at this end gosh it's quite wide our yarn was 100 bfl and it takes five skeins so it's a big it's a big project and you knit all of these lovely chevron points using all these lovely different guard um stitch designs and then you knit an identical piece so you need a second piece and so you start at the other end and you follow that all the way in and then finally you do these two triangles here one at this side and one at this side to join them in the center now i will try and find a photograph of the of the shawl as it looked originally because i decided after i knitted it that it was really in colors that i didn't wear and so it sat in my cupboard for ages and that was really quite a shame because it really is a lovely big warm squishy shawl and so we soaked it in water and some citric acid and then we dropped it into the dye pot with some vermilion acid dye and we over dyed it and this is the this is the effect of dyeing the original colors with the over dye in the vermillion so i'm really pleased with it now because i just wear all the time it is absolutely one of my go-to shawls and it goes with so much in my wardrobe not least of which what i'm wearing underneath so i'll take it off so you can see there we go and this is another hokie design so this is hokey lokitelli's leica cloud and it is a cardigan pattern that's knit top down very interesting construction in that you knit a rectangle and then you pick up stitches along the two edges here and then you start to knit down and it's this lovely texture overall texture which you can see and it comes to just about my hip and this is knitted in kremke soul wool i think it was a yak silk blend in a heavy lace weed and i held it double with a strand of drops kid silk in dark rose so it's a very lightweight cardigan as you can see you can see kind of through it but it's very warm and i just find that i throw it on all the time because it goes goes on over dresses or over tops and it's just a very easy piece to wear so it's a it's a real favorite of mine and i threw it on today because i think i'm going to try on two jumpers for you so that you can see some things i want to talk about with them because this is what i've been working on oh gosh so this is the astrid by junko okamoto and i have knitted it up in jameson and four not four ply jumper weight which is here there we go and it lives in it's been living in my cocoon tree bag with the lovely peacock i will leave links to all of this by the way in the description box so if you need to find anything that's where it'll be including the links to the cocoon tree bags but this is the jameson and smith and it's color 1281 this is kind of peachy shade with these kind of green fibers running through it it is a truly fascinating yarn to knit with and i find it such a joy actually to really kind of explore the colors the of the yarn as they played through it's really beautiful i'm quite glad i've got some left because i'm hoping that after i finished the second sleeve [Laughter] that uh that i will have some left over to do something else with because it's really lovely it was a 500 gram cone that i bought and i think i got it in a sale for about 21 pounds but i think generally they're cones around about 28 pounds which is really terribly good value and and you can find them online at thewoolbrokers.com i really like their yarn it's 100 shetland so it's not soft like merino but it is a lovely yarn and it is it is soft and it will soften up more as it is washed my other yarns are this bright pink and this kind of orangey shade and there's green now that is all roma realm of phenol pt2 so i had the green and i've got the orange here i think i've left the pink somewhere else so we had that and then i have this lovely chartreuse bright limey green and that is the garthanor priscelli which was my leftover from the selbu cowl by inger of the knitting traditions podcast and lastly i had a little bit left over from my slipstravaganza last year's west knits mcal and so i've used that in here as well and as you can see i've almost used all of that up but fortunately i have completed the full color work body so i'm not going to be doing any more color work with these colors on this piece so i have made it and as you can see i've done one sleeve and the sleeves are done with cabling this was my first time cabling without a cable needle and oh my goodness it sped things up so fast and the only reason why i was cabling without a cable needle is because my cable needle broke so rather than trying to track another one down especially at that point because our yarn shops were still closed and i would have had to have ordered one online i watched i think it was a video by andrea murray and now again i'll link this to the i'll link this in the description box and and she just made it really very easy and so i gave it a go and i just got on like a house on fire with it actually super quick and really beautiful and very neat so i'm pleased with that it's a top-down it's a top-down one-size it's sweater by the designer yunko junko okamoto and she does really interesting designs and one of the things that really appealed to me about this was the fact that it is kind of this traditional color work but a really kind of contemporary shape and um i really liked as well that i was using quite contemporary colors as well i've been seeing a lot of these kind of neon brights in the shop windows in scotland our lockdown has lasted for a long time our cafes and restaurants and bars and everything closed six months ago and our non-essential shops closed about five months ago well this week has seen the reopening of that so we are starting to unlock and i'm starting to see these really beautiful bright colors in the windows of of some of the shops and so i just think maybe we're all just really craving this kind of brightness and vibrancy and so i love that i already have this woven and moving through this beautiful knitty jumper so it is a contemporary pattern a contemporary shape sorry um however i'm going to put it on so you can see what it looks like and now this has not been washed and blocked so it's not going to necessarily be the true shape and it's not necessarily going to be sitting as it currently does so so you'll see the neck is quite different so i've seen quite a few people do modifications where they drop this first color work section and they just start the neck from here so but i quite like the neck actually i think it's quite interesting i'm going to stand up so you can see now what happens is because it's a rolled hem it's kind of do you see it's kind of kicking out so what my hope is is that when that gets washed and blocked that that will straighten out and create a nicer shape but we'll need to wait and see however my real concern actually is the sleeve so as you can see it's a very wide sleeve it comes to maybe about four inches away from my from my wrist let me see there you go so it's a three-quarter length sleeve it is bouncing up a little bit just now again because it's not been washed and blocked but it really is very baggy so i think it might need a little bit of um sweater surgery so before i knit the other sleeve i want to decide what i'm doing with this sleeve and what i think i'm going to do is i'm going to take the ribbing off and i'm going to do quite a few decreases to really bring the sleeve in so you'll still have this bit of a bit of a puff around here and then really cinch it in and then do a long piece of ribbing and with negative ease to really sort of finish off the sleeve and hopefully that will then give it the give it an interesting shape but it'll be it'll sit nicer and it'll be a bit more of a usable garment because at my moment my concern is everything's going to catch on this so as my mom said she tends to find these sleeves get caught in door handles and i could see that happening all too easily so yes gosh it's warm hey so i suppose this is one of the wonderful things about a stranded colour work is actually you have created like a double fabric because you have this what you see on the on the outside and then on the inside here's my floats you can see that you're carrying one yarn at the back so you really do kind of create this double fabric which gets pretty warm so now that i've knitted it and we're just moving into summer i may find that i don't have much cause to to wear it however i have really really enjoyed it and for these last couple of weeks as we have been moving towards this unlocking of um of our lockdown it's been it's been a real lifesaver because it's brought me a bit of joy and a bit of brightness and a bit of color and i really appreciated all of that so while i do think it needs some work still and i'm still very happy with it so i'm gonna fix this sleeve and then i'm gonna wash and block it and then i'm going to see how it sits and then if i like it then i'm going to do knit the other sleeve to match if i'm don't if i don't like the edging of the body then my plan for that is to pull up a bit so you can see is to pull it back to this garter rib here and then do a a straight piece of ribbing just to kind of pull this this flat because the rolled edge i think is what's contributing towards the the kind of kicking out that's happening just now but like i said this may all relax out in a in a blocking process and when i say blocking just in case you're not familiar with that basically what i'm going to do is i'm going to soak this jumper in some tepid water i i don't tend to use hot water i use coat i use um quite a cool warm uh bath you know like uh just and you know really really very not um not a hot bath at all so and i'm gonna put it in there with some i tend to use a nice shampoo that i found a super drug so and i put some of that in and i give it a little bit of a wash just very very gently and then i let it sit for well sometimes if it's a small piece then i'll let it sit for maybe half an hour or so a piece like this i'll be leaving for much much longer because really you want to get the water to penetrate all the fibres in the fabric so that it really helps each stitch find its home in the fabric of things if that makes sense i heard somebody say once that you know when we wash and block something it changes it from being homemade to handmade and i think that's quite an interesting and interesting distinction but uh after i do that i will squeeze out very you know i won't ring it at all i'll squeeze out the excess water i'll place it in between a couple of towels i'll roll the towels up and then i'll stand along the length of the towels to squeeze out as much excess water as i possibly can and then after that well i have a couple of different options one is that i can pin it out so put it on the put it on the ground and i have some special foam mats that i have for that and some t pins and possibly even some blocking wires depending on depending on what it is that i'm blocking and whether that requires it or not blocking wires are very good for shawls incidentally but we'll come back to that alternatively i have a kind of a dryer device thing which is basically a couple of net surfaces which are suspended from each other and then i can put i can dry things flat on that and it gets suspended in a cupboard so i've got that option and just dry it flat that's really um a very a very light blocking of any blocking at all and but the other way that i quite like to block a jumper is to put a put a broom handle through both sleeves and then i suspend it on the backs of two dining room chairs quite close to one of my radiators uh because these these places get a little bit cold and a bit they can be a bit damp so just to make sure that it gets it gets dried up nice and quick um and then that really it's just the gravity that's doing the it's doing the blocking work for me in that regard so i'm not quite sure what i'm going to do about this because i am concerned about the the edge of the body so i think that might be uh blocking out on matt with some pins just to try and get the shape that i want from this particular from this particular jumper so there you go this is the astrid by junko okamoto and i am pleased with it but it is needing some work some sweater surgery well talking of sweater surgery i'm now going to share with you some more sweater surgery that i've been doing so also jungkook okamoto now junko's patterns are brilliant the none of this is about your ghost patterns this is about making sure that the that what i'm knitting fits me and fits my body in the way that i want it to fit junko's patterns tend to be one size so you don't have a great amount of option for choosing something for choosing a fit that is going to work with your particular body so i think it really does pay to have some knowledge of how to do modifications and adaptations and actually that is something that you just learn through knitting lots of jumpers lots of sweaters because then you realize oh i quite like this particular neckline or i quite like or you know this is the length of sleeve that i prefer or i prefer waist shaping in my in my work and so you know having done that in one particular pattern you then might want to transpose that and repeat it in a different pattern this is my magnolia by junko okamoto it is a lovely lovely jumper i knitted this last june i think with my friend jackie we were doing the the um junko in june jackie of caddy jack's knits so uh this is what i knitted for that i had really had my eye on it because i do like a split sleeve i find it really interesting so and this has a kind of a dropped hem which is done through short rows which is so clever the whole construction of this i mean it looks relatively simple in some regards but there's there's actually like a lot there's a lot going on which is hidden it's just very very clever shaping and i did see somebody and who had done some project notes on this who had decided they liked the shape but they didn't like the split and so they had basically just knitted this as you know as one piece but actually because of the way the shaping works she then couldn't get her arm through this very narrow piece then so you really need to have the the the split however she did modify it and she has full notes so i do really recommend if you are about to embark on a project that you go and have a look at ravelry project notes if you can then um you might find that somebody has done something that will work well for you and and then you can you can use that adaptation in your own in your own garment okay so here we go now when i first knitted this this is knitted in drops nord incidentally in their plum color way when i first knitted this i was really pleased with it and i'm still really pleased with it however what i noticed was that this sleeve is supposed to be negative ease and i have positive ease now ease basically means like is how close to the body does it sit you know so you can see this isn't sitting that close to the body yeah my arm is here so i would say i've got maybe about an inch or so of positive ease where i'm supposed to have negative ease and negative ease is when it's slightly smaller than the body so it really clings so for example socks need to have negative ease otherwise they just fall off your foot so the body itself has got lots of positive ease yeah it's not sitting anywhere near my body i'll just stand up to show you so yes it's really you know very very loose which is lovely it's exactly the look that i was going for so quite a boxy fit but this i was never very happy with this because what happens is it keeps sliding down and then i lose my hand and also it makes this whole split seem a bit i don't know a bit droopy so i always meant to fix it and i put it off and i put it off you know how we do that you know we need we need things to be made or we need um we need to go back to a project that we feel we've already completed and was a real reluctance to do that isn't there so however after having had the experience with the astros and knowing that i needed to do something with the sleeve and i wasn't quite sure at that point what that was going to be i decided to set it to one side and then i was going to do sweater surgery on this and make it something that really fits me the way that i want it to fit and so i have re-knitted the sleeve so i did this because i wanted you to see the difference so i haven't re-knitted this one yet this one's still to go but this one here i forget to weave my end in but this is fits completely differently this has got negative ease so it really clings to to my arm this was knitted with a 2.5 millimeter needle i think this was knitted with a three millimeter needle and it's made a huge difference in fact i think in this bag somewhere i popped oh yes i did this is the amount of yarn that has come off this sleeve so i've knitted it the to the length i've knitted it to the requirements that that are specified in the pattern but because i've knitted it on needle needles that are two sizes smaller than this one this is the amount of yarn that i have left over from the sleeve compared with what is in this one so it's a reduction of quite a bit of quite a bit of yarn but it sits so much better and i'll show you see look so almost like it gives more definition more shape to the sleeve and it's really got the effect that i want which is bringing and cinching it in at the at the wrist here whereas you can see on this one we're still it's still very baggy so i will be ripping this back and re-knitting this one and then i will have a jumper that i'm really pleased with or even more pleased with i should say so those are my those have been my two projects that i've really been doing the most work on i was swithering about calling this episode a tale of two sleeves [Music] because uh yes it's all about the sleeves at the moment well not all about the slaves because it is also about the shawls so the other project that i've been working on and you'll all have seen this is my half and half triangle wrap but i just wanted to share it with you quite quickly i'll run through the details it's the half and half triangle wrap by pearl soho i am knitting it in pearl soho's linen quill which was a beautiful gift this color is bright flamingo and the modifications i'm using are the german short rows and i am slipping the last stitch with my yarn held forward to create a smooth edge instead of my garter bumps i'm knitting it on a size 3.25 millimeter needle which i think is a u.s size three barrel and i have finished the first skein here we go finished the first skein so i'll be joining this and starting on the second skein but what i wanted you to know because this is a large i should say this is a large size because there is a smaller one this uses six skeins of linen quill the smaller one uses four but with this one skein for this first half i have 124 rows so if you are just starting or you're working through your first row and you were just your first skein and you were wondering how long this is going to be i i've just counted and i think it's 124 rows with the first game so there we go that's that one and um just in case you haven't seen my second color that's what it's going to be so it says bright flamingo with this gorgeous turmeric yellow i think it's called yep turmeric yellow so that's going to be my two my two colors and i'll be joining my second skein and cracking on with that a bit more okay so half and half shawls brings me to my cal announcement so i mentioned last time that i would really like to do a knit along and the knit along is going to be called the all the shawls cowl so that's all the shawls cal and we'll have our hashtag all the shawlscale and we'll also have a secondary hashtag which will be all the shawlscale fo and that's for any finished objects i'll be bringing together the finished objects in my instagram stories so that we can all see them there and i'll also be using those to uh to do the giveaways on on instagram because there is going to be some prizes we'll also be over on ravelry in my group the meaningful stitch and you're welcome to join us over there i look forward to that and i've set up discussion threads there so there is a chat thread so we can just have general chatter there and then there's an f4 thread as well so again i'll be showcasing images from any images that you share from that here and i'll be also selecting people for prizes random generators as for for prizes there as well if you would like to donate a prize to the giveaway then please do get in touch with me at amy palco at googlemail.com and i'll pop that in the description box as well i've had a few people get in touch with me my and my auntie has gotten touched from cocoon tree yarn for cooking tree bags that's her label there her logo the cocoon tree and so she said that she's going to send me a couple of bags eva christie of the perth yarn festival birth festival of yarn sorry sent me a beautiful skein of yarn this is from dye candy and it's the perth yarn club exclusive look at the shades of that it's called a cautionary tale and it's cloud lace which is 74 brushed baby surya alpaca and 26 silk and it's 300 meters for 50 grams and look at these beautiful little pops of color i was thinking you know so if you were going in a garment with this then i don't know you might have seen my uh pink velvet by andrea maury something like this would be would be lovely in that but also i was thinking two of stephen west's striped s-jan and doing the doing the lace section in this that would be completely glorious so a few a few options there so so yes this is from eva christie of perth fest full of yarn it's from the perth cult collaboration club i'm going to leave a link to that they've got this wonderful yarn club that you can go sign up to and think this was from februaries this was february's exclusive colorway that i have a skein of she also does a monthly market there the next monthly market is going to be the 29th and the 30th of may and i will leave a link to that in the description box also i should just show you this too because she sent this for me it's a little mini and it's called redhead at the festival look at these little pops of bread aren't they fab the funny thing is is i used to be a redhead not anymore and my hero went this color in my well throughout my twenties and my thirties until it's kind of it's more of a strawberry blonde now maybe not even strawberry [Laughter] anyway that was a lovely that was a lovely thing eva thank you so much for sending that and the other prize that i want to share with you just now is from the designer joanna herriot and she got in touch with me to say that she would give two patterns two shawl patterns away as part of the giveaway she's incredibly kind she has a beautiful ravelry and shop with her sister rachel rachel mostly does socks i think and joanna mostly does shawls so she has some beautiful patterns i'm going to try and pop a few up here for you to see while i'm talking and uh and joanna also has a a pattern in the new 52 weeks of shawls and i'll be talking a little bit more about that shortly also so beautiful prizes and like i say if you would like to donate a prize then please do get in touch with me and i will give you my mailing address and you can you can send it along and i will keep it uh to give away as part of our little law so to bring give you some inspiration for shawls because i do love a shawl i don't know if you've noticed that i thought i would share with you some of my shawls this is not all of them but a long way but i thought i might share some that that um you might like to have a go at so i'm looking down i'm looking down because i have the most enormous pile of shawls around my feet where to begin where to begin well i'll begin with my first shawl so this was was also actually a mystery in it alone and this is my snowmelt shawl by helen stewart i knitted it in malabrigo sock i cannot remember the colourways but it was this a beautiful green and it's kind of variegated um purpley shade and this sort of purpley blue and it was i guess it was a mystery knit along so you received it in different parts helen stewart is a wonderful designer she lays all of her patterns out and along in the structure of a spreadsheet so it's really easy to keep a track of your work and it's also really easy to make sure using our percentage system how much yarn you've used and making sure that you've still got enough yarn left for the project which is always handy so here we go this is my this is my first shawl um which gosh it was a few years ago now and i can't i couldn't even tell you i do know that i knitted quite a bit of it while watching the six nations rugby so i do know kind of what time of year i watched it just not what year sure we could figure it out if we went back to helen's page but but there we go that was my first one it is a semi-circular shawl you can see so like half pie and half pies work according to where you place your increases along and it's also where i learned how to do an i-cord tab cast on you might find that tab cast ons are quite particularly when you are starting in the middle of a shawl then you probably will have to do a tab cast on one little tip that i have for tab cast ons are when you cast on your stitches for a tab before you start knitting on those stitches slip a safety pin through the stitches and then start knitting because then when you come to when you get to the end of your your knitted tab and you knit along one end and then you pick up your stitches along the long end and then you want to pick up your stitches from the opposite end that you've been knitting on and so if you've already got those stitches on a safety pin it's then really easy to pick them up and really easy to find which stitches uh to use so that's my that's my wee tip for that uh also this is where i started to learn that you really needed to use a stitch markers for lace because it really helped me to keep a track of my lace repeats and i learned how to do an i-cord edging as well on this one so that is one thing that i really love about shawls is they give us an opportunity to learn a new skill a new a new knitting technique and it's generally across a broad piece of fabric so then there's lots of opportunities to continue practicing that technique until you really you really get it so on that note i'll show you another shawl this is by romy hill and it's the beautiful together shawl it was another mystery knit along i was very into mystery little logs at one point and there you go as you can see it's another half pie this yarn i think is from old maiden ant here's a yarn dyer not too far away from here she dyes really beautiful yarns as you can see and i learned short row lace short rows for this which was a little which was pretty dear i'm blowing out terribly but which is pretty confusing actually if i'm completely honest it took me quite a long time to figure out i did try and do it while i was out um at a cafe with a friend and then quickly realized that was not the place to do this kind of knitting that i needed to be home and uh reading the pattern very closely but i'll just pop it on so you can see it so i think this is a two skein project so it is a smaller shawl than the kinds that i generally knit now i quite often a much larger shawl but it is nice particularly when it's not when it's not too cold and you just want a wee pop of a blue pop of color and a little bit of this edging took forever but was really exquisite these uh shawls i knew they are a few years old now and so really they do they would really benefit from being re-blocked i think i also blocked these before i had my blocking wires so if i was to block this now then what i would be doing was that i would feed the wire through each one of these loops and then pin the wire down and that way you get a really beautiful block with actual points along the edging so like i said i really could do with a reblock but i'll add that to my list of things to do so that's roomy hills beautiful together i will tell you something as well this blackberry stitch was a bit of a killer i remember it being quite sore in my hands but there we go that's the that's that one uh what to show you next well you've seen this one before but i'll share it again this is the excuse me shawl by stephen west and this was the first shawl that i ever knitted brioche so i used this shawl pattern to teach me brioche and this you know by reading the instructions giving it a go getting it wrong over and over and over and over and ripping it back until i got it right uh it really kind of gave me a really good grounding of brioche and then of course it is this large suede of fabric so like i say you are practicing this stitch over and over and over until you really get to get it in your head and the other thing i did was i found youtube tutorials because there are youtube tutorials for everything and like i said i'm still looking up you know i would think of myself as quite an experienced knitter but i still look up youtube tutorials on how to do things all the time and there's always going to be new techniques and new ways of doing things that that i want to have a go at that i want to integrate into my own knitting practice and so youtube videos are perfect for that so this yarn was some alpaca silk sport weight which i found in a charity shop and it's hand dyed and it's lovely i think i got it for about 99 pence of skin which seemed like an absolute steal and i can honestly say this is one of my most worn shawls it is one that quite often sits out in the lounge because others like to to pop it on or wrap themselves up in it too because it's very warm and squishy and cozy and that is the thing about brioche it does create a very lovely squishy fabric and it really is like being hugged when you wear it brioche also creates this on one side and this on the other side so it is a reversible fabric so you can choose which way to wear it if i was to do it again this is where i learned this part here and actually i kind of like that because you know it really is it is messy it's not that neat but that's that's the place that i really practiced and really learned and i ripped this back a brioche tab starter is a really difficult place to start brioche i'm not necessarily sure i would recommend um learning brioche with a brioche tab but um but i did get there it is a little bit messy but i really don't care because i just love this and it's such a brilliant shape it's kind of like a long asymmetric triangle so like i said i wear this one a lot right next up well i'll show you another one you've seen before and this is the looney by natasha hornby i think this is the one i wore in my very first episode and this was knitted using some snailden and some soldier yarn which was sent to me by my friend jackie of caddy jack's knits and she had already knitted one and she had a lot of yarn left over so she sent me her leftover yarn and then i just needed to buy i think it was another skein of this cream which is the snailden uh to to really finish it off it's beautiful shawl it's mosaic knitting which is a form of color work which is super easy to do because you unlike with stranded colour work where you are bringing two strands or more along with you in your in your knitting and this you're only ever carrying you're only ever using one strand of yarn and the rest of it is formed through slip stitches so you're slipping your color up through your your rows so you would knit this dark blue here and then you would slip the light and then you would knit the dark and then slip the light and then when you switched around you would you would do the opposite so it's a beautiful shawl it's again it's a very cozy one i love the tassels aren't they fab i do love a tassel and again it was quite an interesting construction because you knitted this very long shallow triangle and then you picked up stitches and knitted down so it's almost like knitting a knitted on border and i can show you the back as well just so you can see this is the back of the the mosaic so it's not really reversible in the way that brioche is but it looks almost woven i think it's a really beautiful effect so there we go that's the lunae by natasha hornby who is moonstruck knits and she's a designer based in amsterdam which is one of my favorite cities okay so another one here this is the fleur and it's a free pattern by sparstrico i have knitted mine in drops puna which is their dk alpaca 100 alpaca and their kid silk which is i consult mohair and i've knitted it using a bright bright pink and a pale pink strand held together to make my stripes and my bobbles and this shawl really let me practice making bubbles and now i really have like a bobble technique that i'm happy with that uh that really gives me the bubbles that i'm that i'm pleased with and that they don't pop through the back of the fabric so so i'm really pleased with with this one and i think it's very dramatic i love the bright pink pop against the i guess this squishy alpaca and you can see actually the alpaca's not actually black but it's like a very it's like an espresso it's like a very very dark chocolatey brown so there we go that's i would quite happily knit this one again it was very meditative it was a lovely process it's a well-written pattern and i think if you have some if you have some yarn in your stash and you're wondering what to do with it you could absolutely do worse than than one of these and i think they've also brought out a one color fingering weight shawl version of this also um i seem to remember maybe it was knitted in like a pale turquoisey shade but it was beautiful too so there you go that's the fleur and okay i will show you this one i told you there was a lot of shawls down here this is my icarus by miriam felton and this is one of my first real sort of all-over lace shawls i love it because it's kind of it's like the frame you know the story of icarus how he made the wings and flew to fight flew too close to the sun and the sun melted the wax and his wings and he fell to the earth fell so well to the sea actually i think so it's like the frame center and then it's like the feathers at the edges and this is knitted in skin queen oasis lace which is a camel silk weight and this is an eat this for me is an evening shawl you know for when we used to go out in the evenings i knitted this actually for going down to london my husband and i went down on a break weekend break to london and we went to the west end and we saw david tennant in don juan and we splashed out and we got a box in the theater and we got dressed up and i wore this beautiful shawl it was a wonderful a wonderful evening and i really felt like my shawl did it justice so it's it's this yarn is just absolutely divine when i saw it in i got it from eyf actually edinburgh yarn festival and when i saw it i was so in love with it i bought two skeins and each skein had 800 meters i think well this actually only used one of the schemes and i gave the other skin to my best friend jen and she has since used it in a beautiful jumper so there you go this is the icarus by miriam felton so if you have a beautiful skein of 100 of 800 meter lace weight yarn you might want to think of something like this i'm just gonna have to put it on again because i really like it and actually i've been wearing much much thicker weight shawls um up till now because because of the weather but i think we're just beginning to get up to that slightly warmer temperature where a bit of a a lighter weight shawl is just just a lovely thing so there we go that is the icarus another lace suite shawl which again this one really could do with another blocking but this is the asana by helen stewart this was actually part of her first shawl society i think and certainly part of one of her shawl societies anyway and this yarn is again it's really beautiful it's a merino silk lace weight from ginger twist studio and it's in the color lallybroch which you might recognize from a certain show about a time traveling sassanic anyway one reason why i wanted to show you this one is because this is one of my shawls that has beads and my way of doing beading in shawls or in knitting is to use a very tiny crochet hook where i can take the stitch off of my needle and slip the bead onto the stitch and then put the stitch back onto the needle and then knit it in that way so it is time uh it does take a lot of time to do but the effect i think is really lovely and can create a really beautiful weighted shawl so you can you can see that the beads are in the center of each one of these lace repeats so this is a crescent shawl so it's kind of like a very shallow half circle with extra extra bits at the side so i think it actually sits really nice um you can pull it around and you've got these you've got these tilly bits again this is a lighter weight because it's less sweet and you absolutely must use stitch markers for your for your lace repeats because these are quite large lace repeats and i seem to remember that there were there's lace knitting on both the right side and the wrong side for some of these for some of this and so that's that's just something to be aware of so it's a slightly more advanced lace pattern but like i said helen stewart lays all of her patterns out as a spreadsheet so they are really easy to keep a track of so there you go that's my asana i've got a few more to go are you still up for some more this is my hipster shawl and this is in i think it's bc garn uh soft silk which is a dk weight 100 silk yarn again it's got these lit beautiful little tassels this design has these great cross stitches which i think look really good and kind of a textured design which gets a little bit lost i think and particularly maybe it's just in the the type of fiber that i've chosen this is a summer shawl for me because it's made in the silk fat in the silk fiber it's actually a little bit lighter weight for me and so um i like to wear this with my summer dresses in the evenings and things i i do really love it it feels really nice and it again you see it's not uh it's not a super shiny silk it's more of a sort of a slippy silk and i got this actually from my mum's local yarn shop which is called my little mai which is in a cognac and and i just really love this color in fact this color will be making a reappearance a little later but there we go this is the hipster shawl and that's by joki lochitelli i think she brought it out a few years ago i also think that my um tassels are a little bit different from what i can remember from the pattern because again i found a project that had done tassels uh that i preferred the look of and it had a whole tutorial on how to do those tassels so i followed the tutorial in the project to make those to make my tassels look like that but there you go that's the hipster shawl and i'm going to show you this one because sometimes we don't always have a success this is a beautiful shawl and it is beautiful yarn i just uh did not make a good pairing between shawl and yarn and that's because well this is the malvin by lucy hague and she does the most amazing cables as you can see can you see the cable work really beautiful and this yarn is in the colorway jasper and it is a 100 shetland cobweb by old maiden and my problem is is that and it's a circular shell so you start in the center and you work your way out my problem is is that because i knitted it in a cobweb and because it's a circular shawl and also because it's cables and not lace i've ended up with a shawl that's actually too small so you can see what happens here it's you can wear it like that i suppose but um but really it's it's too small uh if i knitted it in the fingering weight that the pattern was supposed to be then i would have probably about or in slightly larger if add up the needle size or something i would have ended up with a larger shawl so again it's nothing to do with the pattern it's also nothing to do with the yarn this is absolutely on me because i'm i mismatched the pairing because it is a beautiful pattern the other thing i did was um i did my increases wrong so i've ended up creating little holes when you're supposed to not have those little holes that's all supposed to be closed you can see there but because i started with that i thought well as long as i continue um then it's then it's a statement it's a style statement rather than a mistake okay two more shawls and actually they're both the same design this is my garter goodness by stephen west and this was my first fade and it took a long time to build this fade so i had a very very pale pale grey and a slightly darker gray i think this is called silver fox and this is called pewter and that's both lycan and lace then they're 100 merino single ply and then i found this gorgeous green this i think it's called poison ivy and that's from villain vine and i had that sent over from new york and it cost me a lot of money and shipping and customs unfortunately and then um i managed to find this which would take me from the gray into the green at i think it was actually oh i think it was inverness i think i went to the yarn festival in inverness and they had a hand dyer there which goes by the brand ripples and i managed to get this skin that would take me through my feed i like to think of it as you know you i don't know if you if you have this where you live but um these large like boulders of quartz and then you've got the moss that started to creep up the quartz boulder that's what i thought of when i looked at this that's what the that's what i had in mind when i was putting together this fade now lots of people don't like this part of the design this kind of it seems like an extraneous flat i actually love it i think it's genius because what you do is you take it and you put it down and it actually sits next to your you know next to your chest and so if you've got like a v-neck on or a round neck then actually it just kind of gives it an extra layer of fabric and it keeps you cozy and actually then the whole piece sits much nicer as well because then you have this folded edge i think there's people who have and done modifications to to to get rid of that part actually i really like it so so there you go this was my first fade it's a foreskin project it is mostly garter stitch but you are just doing these occasional increases which you mark with your stitch marker so you just knit knit until you get your stitch marker and then you do a yarn over so it's a lovely easy pattern and it creates a really beautiful shape which i will show you just now there you go so i was really pleased with how this worked out and like i said it was my first fade so gosh i'm going to start moving some of these shots over to the other side and i'll show you one last one and again this is one that i wear an awful lot it's another garter goodness so again we've got this this flap here this is in la vie enemy merino singles uh in the colorway arya and dawn is it dawn or is it highgarden it might have been highgarden and this silky silky and mohair here i think that's done i think the single ply merino is high garden and so the pattern doesn't say to stripe in mohair that's just something that i did to create the the effect that i wanted and then i found another skein of yarn from tulamata which is called little miss and it was just the most perfect shade to fade from the arya into the high garden and then into the into the dawn i wear this one a lot this smells like my perfume that i was wearing yesterday because i had it on yesterday so i find this really easy to wear it feels the how does it feel it feels silky it feels soft it's just it feels light and fluffy and just completely delicious i love this shawl this is one of my absolute favorites and i bought a raincoat the same colors as so i can wear it all the time so so there we go that's the the second garter goodness so you can knit another shawl that you've shawl pattern that you've knitted before and get really quite a different effect depending on what kind of uh fiber you're using and what kind of colors you're choosing and what kind of combination you're you're you're choosing for the second or third or fourth shawl so there we go oh that's like i said that is just a selection there are more but that's i think that's enough for one day okay so to give you a little bit more inspiration if that was not enough i wanted to share with you something that i picked up yesterday can you guess what it is it's a 52 weeks of shawls see when they brought out 52 weeks of socks and i think we've already established on this podcast that i am not a sock knitter remember i said i'm not a cable knitter and i'm not a um colour work knitter and i'm clearly both of those i'm probably also a sock knitter but just in denial but i am most definitely a shawl knitter so i heard they were doing a 52 weeks of shawl's book after they brought out the 52 weeks of socks and i knew desperately that i wanted this book and i could have waited for it to come out in the post from my local yarn shop and i bought it from ginger to a studio but i couldn't wait so so i popped in and picked it up yesterday so the postman wouldn't bring it to me i would already have it and when i got home i read it through from cover to cover and then when i got to the end i started at the beginning and i went all through it again and then after that i sat on the floor and i pulled out my stash and i pulled up yarn combination after yarn combination to have a little think about what what shawls that i wanted to knit from this so i just wanted to share i'm going to share a few with you and i have written out the page numbers one thing to say is this it's a beautifully constructed book and it's got absolutely stunning photography let me just look at this for an example beautiful and it's laid out it's kind of divided up into sections like this so this is week 14 to 26. i'm not sure these are necessarily um what you would knit in a week to be completely honest i think this is going to do you a lot more than this is this is more than a year's worth of knitting by a very very long way so this is one that i really loved which is the wild flowers this is a dk weight shawl and it staked to kind of create this fringing but i just absolutely love the variety of those of those wild flowers ah another one page 87 this is the alve and this is by larka of the fibertails podcast and again it's another steep shawl very intrigued by steeped shawls because after all the knitting shawls i've done i've never staked one and if you don't know what a stick is it's basically where you cut your knitting so you knit kind of round and round and round and then when you cast off you then use your scissors and you cut your way up which all sounds pretty terrifying but actually if you've knitted it in a yarn which is a non-superwash and it has a little bit of toothiness to it then it will generally stick to itself and it won't unravel and then you can finish it off so there we go i think that's a beautiful color work shawl and then gosh there's just so many to show you it was really hard just to cut down this is one this one's called granada and it's by claudia quint quintanilla quintanilla look this is used uh this uses isaiah spinny tweed i think six skeins of it and it is which is a lace sweet but it's just gorgeous and with tassels more tassels all the tassels okay 53. oh yes [Music] isn't this gorgeous look at that it says that this yarn is beale balance by bc garn which is an organic cotton organic wool blend and it is a sport weight yarn this is called rough r-u-f roof rough it's beautiful i just love that i love the the um simplicity of it i think it's beautiful two three five okay it's stephen west's design uh rainbow road it's called what i loved about this and what i think i might do this basically you're holding two strands of lace weight the whole way through so you're marling and i actually think with the quantities that it says that you need of these secondary colors i was thinking you could actually hold your uh your single strand of lace sweet the whole way through and then you add in your secondary colors with maybe a bowl or two of my hair so it would be very fluffy and completely delicious i think but i'm quite intrigued by that but it looks like it's created with short rows you kind of short row wedges which gradually get bigger as you go along so it starts off quite small and then grows which i think looks really very cool uh two three one is the next one i've got oh yes i love this look at that it's a beautiful all-over lace shawl it's just stunning by valentina kocciani to bc and it's six skeins of the fingering weight by la nevado van lanny vendoli so there you go that's that's a few and there's lots of other ones there i think oh i'll show you just i'll show you just one more 197. this one is called windy gate and it looks like the fabric is pleated isn't that beautiful i love that i've been really loving the um pleats that have been appearing in the christian dior range uh when they they did their their catwalk recently and there was lots of pleated skirts and things and i started getting very intrigued about what pleating would look like in knitwear and then it just so happens that they have a that line i have a shawl in here that um that replicates that particular design so i'm really really interested to explore that oh okay one last one because the question then becomes what do you cast on first so let me show you what i'm going to cast on first this is stipper stones by joanna harriet and so joanna is the one that's donated two uh patterns of her self-published shawls so not this one but her self-published shawls and so to celebrate that i thought this would be the first one that i knitted from the book it's a beautiful chevron design it starts off with a smaller edge and builds up longer and you create these kind of um reverse stockinette ridges and you bring in some different colors of mohair to create a kind of a soft exploration of color so i'll show you the yarn that i want to use for that which is i'm going to be using my host super soft massive cone and this is in their unbleached uh white and alongside that i have three colors of mohair which i'm going to be using which are these aren't these lovely these are both is there a silk mohair i'm not sure what this one is because this was in my advent calendar from my mum this last year so i've decided i'm going to pop it in there because i think it's beautiful so that's what my stipper stones shawl is going to be and that's going to be my first cast on and i'm going to do that later on today in honor of starting our all the shawls cal so i do so hope that you will join in with the all the shoals cal we start today we go all the way until the 31st of october it's a six-month cowl you can knit as many shawls as you like there's no restrictions around how big the shawl needs to be or what the shape of the shawl needs to be i'm being quite loose with the definition of shawls so if you have a scarf pattern that you want to knit instead that would also count and the other thing to say is you can double dip so if there's other cows that you're participating in you can still also participate in mine i'm absolutely fine with that you would have to check the rules for for the other cow obviously but but i'm completely fine with that the other thing is that you are more than welcome to uh to do a whip to to work in a work in progress you do not need to restrict yourself to a new cast on although i know a new cast on is always a lovely thing but i'm very uh i'm a big proponent of of finishing off those languishing whips so if this cal encourages you to pick up an old project bag that's maybe been tucked away somewhere that has a shawl in it that's maybe only partially finished then please do take that out and you can absolutely contribute that and and work on that as i said before there is a finished object thread in the ravelry group and there is also the finished object a hashtag that you can use in instagram because i know that ravelry is not available to everybody at the moment and i think that's a very sad thing but i did want to make sure that there was still a way for us to participate on instagram so there's a hashtag there and like i said i'm taking donations for prizes and i will put together some prize packages and i'll share those with you as and when they come in and as and when i group them oh oh great i've got one last thing to share with you which are one last section really which is i've had some really really amazing male days the postman has been coming up and down to my my flat uh like a mad thing because there's been so many beautiful things come through the post so one of those things was a huge box appeared at my door and then i remembered that i had signed up for a workshop in natural dyeing and weaving with a company called 1719 or charity actually called 1719 then they're based down in sunderland and i will leave a link to there to their website in the description box but i had signed up for a week while ago it really hadn't cost me very much money at all and they said they would send me out the materials to participate in the class so a couple of days before the class was due to start i was sent this enormous box and it had in it alum and lots of these little little paper bag packages and in some of the packages there were i can find well in some of them there is more than teeth fabric and mordanted um roving and we died over the course of the time we we dyed some roving and fabric together because i had also a little packet of dye stuff with this one had some black tea which i still have because i haven't done that one i use something called a plant called scabiosa which i think is actually like a blue colored um flower so i used that one for my natural dyeing in my class and it also had these packages here which says cotton and roving and when i open them it's these amazing little rolls of fabric and they've been dyed with what what have been died in and whether it's a full shade or an exhaust bath so this is damiana and this is avocado and i think this is hibiscus aren't they this was honestly just such a treat daffodil and i'll show you one more black bean kind of like a violet shade so i had all of these fabrics and then i also had all of these um bits of roving i'll show you some of them too so this is red onion skin and this is avocado exhaust bath and what else do i have in here oh there's some yellow daffodil so there we go i had all of these wonderful bits of roving and then over the course of our time our two hours together we dyed we created a dye bath using some of the dye stuff we'd been given and while that was simmering away we did some weaving on our little wooden limbs and i'll show you and we learned different techniques and things and this is what i created so we learned just basic weaving we learned these knots with the fabric and then we learned how to like um do kind of half of uh of one color and half of the other and then we learned this completely different weaving technique there so that was really good fun and we got to talk a little bit more about the the colors that natural dye and then at the end of our time together we um then dyed up a bit of fabric or some of the roving so uh i did i did like i said scabioza and the roving and this is the color that i got isn't that absolutely amazing i left it for quite a few days because i really wanted to give it an opportunity to have a quite an intense die but i'm really pleased with how it worked out and uh it reminds me it's so gold you know it reminds me of rumpelstiltskin you know i had to spin the spin the gold it feels like rumpelstiltskin spun gold so that's that's how i'm thinking of it but uh that was a lot of fun so so that was something that arrived in the post so that was pretty epic really it was so much more than i was expecting and and it was such a such a delight we had a really lovely tutor who took us through the whole process she was very kind she was very generous and with her time and her and her knowledge and the whole the whole thing was a complete treat and a delight and a real bright point i think in um what sometimes felt like quite a grueling winter of lockdown so that that was a really lovely bright point uh the other thing that arrived in the post was this because i want a giveaway so twin oranips which is a podcast here on youtube they were doing a subscriber giveaway and i won it so i won this beautiful kit to make this berry look how gorgeous that is i'm so excited about this i just want to cast it on straight away this is the yarn which is this lovely rich navy blue and it's sixty percent merino twenty percent highland wool and twenty percent mohair and it's 169 meters for 50 grams so would be just a heavy a heavy sport weight and a light dk so i'm really i'm really excited about this and then also in here just to show you because i got this lovely little project bag but there's a really little bag inside wait do you see this this is so cute inside this was a little label made with love that i get put inside my hat isn't that cute and not only that but they also popped in this beautiful basic bar lotion from harbor creek honey and i've been using it on the backs of my hands because i've been getting very dry hands i still think so many of us have been actually because of the because we've been doing all this hand washing and applications of hand sanitizer so uh so that was very welcomed also i'm gonna pop all of this back in here so i don't lose any of it so that was from jess and erica of twin orange and i do recommend you go and check them out they're a lot of fun they do beautiful knitwear they're always choosing you know just such beautiful fun fabrics they're also really into their spinning too they do wonderful yarns uh so they're they're a lot of fun and they they you know they really share really lovely knitting so there we go that was that was my prize what else did i get oh yes my mum sent me two skeins of trey lizzy's uh psyche base which is a merino silk a single ply and it's in the colorway mother of dragons and honestly this shade is just look at that is that not just completely glorious so i'm gonna have to figure out this is definitely shawl this is absolutely definitely a shawl almost reminds me a bit of a tiger lily as well actually so i just absolutely love this so i'm really excited about that and wondering what to what to knit with that so i've got some some thinking to do but i've got lots of uh lots of inspiration for shawls so i'm sure i'll come up with a beautiful project so that was that was just so lovely to receive in the post so thank you mom and i've got a few purchases that i made well here's one because like i said we opened back up uh oh scotland started to open back up again on monday there are still restrictions in place and pla everywhere has to close i think eight there's no alcohol indoors so we do still have some restrictions in place but we are much more open now than we have been in a very long time so on tuesday i went out with my daughter to her kilt making class and i was being measured for a kilt because my daughter's going to make her ladies kill that she needs to make to qualify as a as a kilt maker and so she wants to to make it for me so i needed to go in and be measured and because i was willing to go in and be measured and then i've stood in as a model for the for them to teach the class so that was a lot of fun it was the most it was a lovely group of people and i hadn't really been around groups of people for a week while so so that was really really nice and afterwards i went across the road to the scottish textile showcase which is new so they were originally in the tron kirk which had a marketplace just on the royal mile however that has not been open for well over a year now because of corona and so they decided that they needed to get their own premises so they now have a shop on saint mary's street which again is just off the royal mile and they sell just beautiful goods i will leave a link to their website and um you should also follow them on instagram because they've got some really beautiful products they have a lot of accessories and garments they sell fabric they sell um gifts they sell hebride and tweed and they've got really strong and good relationships lots of different scottish textile makers including die gilpin so i bought some dye gilpin lalland because i figured you know this is my first time out there out the house properly for a week while i should mark this occasion about being able to to buy things in shops again with this with some yarn so i bought four of these which gives me 700 meters and i've also pre-ordered the new liner magazine that comes out next week and i think there is a lovely top in that which i could possibly knit with my new lalland and then yesterday i went into town again and i went to ginger twist studio i picked up my 52 weeks of shawls i pre-ordered the liner magazine and i bought this skein of yarn now this when i went into ginger twist they have spent the lockdown dying up the most amazing array of colors i will pop a photograph in here because it was honestly breathtaking such beautiful variety and such vibrancy and just completely glorious like a yarn rainbow and so i felt really really very bad for going in then and saying i need a skein of a plain undyed sport weight yarn put that but i did i need it for a project so i will share that project with you just now so but just know that this is not really terribly representative of the stock that ginger twist have right now which is just the most fabulous array of colors so this is pinup sport and it's 300 meters and it's 80 superwash merino and 20 nylon so and i've got it to go with this which is cowgirl blues merino twist it's also 300 meters for 100 grams and it's 100 a superwash merino so my plan i've got four skeins of this and one skein of this and my plan is to knit a plum by junko okamoto so i'm on a i'm on a jungkook moto trip at the moment and uh this i don't have enough of this to do the whole jumper so this is going to be like a band that sits here where the lace work is and where the color work is and my color work is going to be this this is going to be the plums and i'm going to hold two strands of this lace weight which is kremke soul wool silky kid and i'm going to hold two skeins of that two sorry two strands of that together for the color work so my color work will have a little bit of textural contrast as well as color so there we go that was a huge amount of knitting and inspiration and more shawls than you could possibly imagine and so i think i'll close up there we are at one hour and 25 minutes so this is an exceptionally long one so i apologize oh now i've dropped my book here we go but i do have a poem to share with you just as we conclude so what my hope is for this uh for this knit along is all the shawls cowl is that it will allow each one of us to show up and shine that we will be encouraging each other we'll be helping each other we'll be supporting and cheering each other on and really helping each one to build up their own creative confidence and that for me is this you know divine spark you know this this call to show up and shine and on that note i'd like to share with you this poem and it's by alice walker and it's called before i leave the stage before i leave the stage i will sing the only song i was meant truly to sing it is the song of i am yes i am me and you we are i love us with every drop of our blood every atom of our cells our waving particles undaunted flags of our being neither here nor there i love that and i love you and i'm so excited about this cal i do so hope you'll join us on instagram and on ravelry if you have any questions at all please do leave them in the comments and until next time know that i'm thinking of you then i'm sending you love and i'm wishing you all good things and i'm wishing you really good mail days okay my loves take care

Channel: Amy Palko

Views: 11,026

Rating: 4.976048 out of 5

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Id: eTNOSmJ0Wtk

Length: 87min 5sec (5225 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021