In the end, as you all suspected, everything is fine. With the knitting finished and the object blocked, it’s smaller than a shawl but bigger than a kerchief. I failed to measure anything before I blocked it, but I suspect it wound up about 32 inches wide. After blocking, it’s 42 inches wide and 21 tall. It’s just big enough to be useful, but I had an idea and it may be going to live with someone else anyway. I’ll definitely make it again, either way. I just love this combination of textures.
For the sake of anyone who’s wanted to knit Orlane’s Textured Shawl Recipe but didn’t know how to fill in the blanks, here’s how to do it:
It’s a top-down shawl, which means you begin with the few stitches right at the base of the neck and work outwards into the triangle, which is shaped by increases along the way. Start with the garter tab cast-on — Stephen West’s tutorial is terrific — which will leave you with 9 stitches on your needle. Now work a setup row: k2, place marker, m1L, k2, m1R, place marker, k1, place marker, m1L, k2, m1R, place marker, k2. You’ve now marked off the two edge stitches and the center stitch. The top edge (the two stitches on either end) is worked in garter stitch, so you’ll knit the first and last two stitches on every row. Every right-side row is an increase row, worked the same as the setup row above: k2, slip marker, m1L, work to next marker, m1R, slip marker, k1, slip marker, m1L, work to next marker, m1R, slip marker, k2. A wrong-side row in a stockinette or textured portion of the shawl is: k2, purl to the last two, k2 (slip all markers, obviously). Once you get to the garter border, a wrong-side row is just knit every stitch. Hope that helps.
If you’re smarter than me (especially if you’re using a yarn that’s a drastically larger or smaller gauge than her DK), you’ll knit a gauge swatch and measure your row gauge. If you have a target height you’d like your shawl to be, multiply that by your row gauge and you’ll know how many rows you’ll be knitting. Then you can divide those up between stockinette, textured and garter rows however you like.
Mine is 16 rows of stockinette (41 sts on the needles), then 14 rows of the textured stitch, 14 stockinette, 14 textured, 14 stockinette, 8 textured, 30 garter. The yarn is the really delicious Pioneer from A Verb for Keeping Warm, knitted on US8 needles.
After consulting with Twitter friends, given that I wanted to block this fairly aggressively, I used Elizabeth Zimmermann’s sewn bind-off, and wow, I love it — this despite the fact that it took me THREE AND A HALF HOURS! I also took the time to use blocking wires on this to make it as perfect as possible. And it was perfect when the wires came out. But two hours later, when I took the photo on the right above, it had already started to go a little wobbly along the top edge again. Of course, when it’s around your neck nobody knows if that edge is straight or not. As long as the rest is flat and lovely, I’m content.
Cheers to Orlane. And heartfelt thanks if you’d favorite it on Ravelry.
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In other news (for anyone who missed the edit), Pom Pom Quarterly is back in stock!
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