Holly

This is an excerpt from Shawls to Play With, a shawl collection that is more than the individual patterns, it’s about bringing more freedom to your knitting.

LETS TALK YARN

You’re at a yarn shop, wandering around looking at an amazing array of colors and fibers. A skein catches your eye, you pick it off the shelf, and fall in love. Madly, madly in love. Repeat.
Before you know it, your basket is full, you’ve checked out, and are on your way home with your haul, including a skein or two of lace weight that you didn’t mean to pick up, but that were too pretty to resist. Those skeins hang around your stash, until you finally do a yarn cleanse and pass them along to a lace knitting friend.

Sound familiar? A substantial portion of my stash is lace weight yarn passed along from friends who realized they would never, ever, knit with it. I’m happy to take beautiful yarn off your hands. But I’d be even happier spreading the lace weight love.

I get it. tiny yarn + tiny needles + big shawl + crazy lace = eep!

However, lace shawls are divine. They’re light, airy, drapey, ethereal, and well worth the headache.
But I concede, sometimes they’re a headache.

One of the most straight forward ways to reduce some of the headache of lace is to scale the project up. Many scale their lace projects up by using sock or fingering weight yarns. This does make the project less intimidating, however, most easily accessible thick yarns (especially sock yarns), are designed for durability instead of for drape. This makes them great for sturdy socks, but not so great for drapey shawls. When you use sock yarns for lace shawls, you’re exchanging the drape of lace yarns for the durability of sock yarns.

There’s nothing wrong with fingering weight yarns for lace shawls. It’s been done many times with great success. However, you will never get an ethereal shawl out of sock yarn.
Sock yarn just isn’t ethereal.

Instead I would suggest holding multiple strands of lace weight yarn together.

By holding multiple strands of lace weight together, you keep the drapey properties of lace yarn, while simultaneously being able to go up needle sizes. Of course not all of the properties of lace weight yarn scale up one hundred percent, but many of them do.

The shawls in this collection are perfect for…

…that special skein you’ve been hoarding

We all have very special skeins of yarn that we have no idea what to do with.
Maybe it comes with special memories.
Maybe it’s too variegated.
Maybe it’s not quite your color but is still breathtaking.

These shawls are for the skein that won’t play second fiddle to an intricate lace pattern.
No complex stitch patterns to steal the show, just an expanse of stockinette and strategically placed increases, so these patterns let the yarn shine.

…combining colors or mixing fibers & textures

Holding multiple strands together lets you easily mix colors. Or fibers.
And because the yarn is the star of these patterns there’s no lacework to obscure.

It means you can concentrate on your colors and textures and fibers.
Mix colors, or textures, or both.
The possibilities and combinations are limitless.

This was an excerpt from Shawls to Play With.