Shaping lace

The planning stage for my red lace shawl design is completed now, and my sister has the skeleton instructions with charts to knit the full-sized sample. I’m very excited about this design as I love the way the pattern looks in this yarn. I am also very pleased with the construction method I have developed for it:

The shawl will be knitted in one piece from one end to the other to a shape which is basically an upside down trapezium. In other words it’ will be a rectangle with a triangle at each end. This means at one end the width is gradually increased until the full width is achieved, then after knitting the centre rectangle straight, the width is gradually decreased at the other end.

I wanted the increase and decrease sections to perfectly mirror each other, so had to work very carefully with the pattern placement for the Shetland rose lace that forms the main pattern. All this planning took place with the charts on my computer, then I knitted a shawlette-sized swatch (pictured below) to check that my calculations were correct.

This is the last time you will see this design now until the pattern is ready to publish. That may be a month or so from now, as the full-sized sample has to be knitted, then there will be a properly modelled photo shoot to do, and meantime I have to write up the pattern in full, create a pleasing layout for it, and have it checked/improved by a technical editor. Sadly that all takes a significant amount of time to do.