It starts with a sketch…

Today is going to be first in what I hope will be a series of posts about designing a shawl. Well how I design anyway.

It normally starts with a sketch. Now I will admit straight up, I am not good at drawing. But I can make a decent enough diagram that I can put my ideas on paper.

This shawl has actually been sitting and gurgling in my mind for a while. It has changed a number of times and I will probably produce numerous shawls from the original idea. If I have the time anyway.

Now back to the sketch. It doesn’t really matter if you can’t draw, even if it is a basic shape broken into sections that you label it can help flesh out your idea.

You can see mine above.

The next step is the first part in turning a sketch into reality. Finding the right stitch pattern and working it into the design. This is not a simple shawl though my idea seemed to be at the beginning. It has a cable for the “tree trunk”, lace for the “leaves” including a leaf edging, and it will use short rows for shaping the “branches” and increases to make each row wider. 

Seems complicated? Well it really depends where your knitting skills sit. I wouldn’t class myself as higher than an intermediate knitter and been then I definitely have strengths and weaknesses. Some designs can be very simple. You take the formula to create a shape and add a stitch pattern for where your skills sit.

The Limerick shawl was one designed for simplicity.

 
 It was literally created as I said above. I picked the crescent shawl formula (increase by 4 each WS row and increase by 2 each RS row, all on the edges), used a simple drop stitch pattern, added some blocks of garter and Stockinette and added a curved drop stitch for the border. And tada, one shawl.

 This one, well it is slightly more complicated. This shawl involves math. As does a lot of knitting. But specifically this one involves numbers matching up different stitch patterns and short rows.

But that will be discussed in my next post. Until then, here is a sneak pack of the yarn I will be using for this shawl. Now imagine the colours translated into my sketch.