Yarn on Thursday: links to a few lovely shawls!

Shawls in my Queue... just in case you haven't stumbled across these lovelies, here's a selection of shawls, stoles and wraps that are Out There (and either in my queue, or which I've already knitted up).

Secret of the Stole I, II and III by Nauticalknitter (aka Deborah F.) are amazingly lovely "mystery shawls", where every week during a specified time period, more rows of the pattern are revealed. They're all beautiful, and I'm waiting for Secret of the Stole IV. I'm knitting SotS-1 in some Pistachio Claudia Hand Painted Silk Lace, with these amazing coppery pearls. I got to about row 100 and managed to drop a stitch, and wasn't quite up to getting everything back on the needles back then, so it got frogged, swatched again, and I got this far:


swatch


Take II of SotS-1
Secret of the Stole II? This one, I actually finished. It's made from Sanguine Gryphon's Gaia Lace, and is soooooo soft. And the pattern was a total blast to knit!




SotS-3 started great. I found this wonderful (blockable!) yellow cotton yarn, and some great orange/yellow/red/garnet beads, and was chugging along just fine...


... and then I realized the shawl was going to have snowflakes all over it... which didn't exactly go. So, that got frogged, and eventually I will have a kick@ss beaded cotton sweater. And when I restart SotS-3, it will be made of The Really Limited Edition One-Time-Only Bernat Sparkle Yarn That Had To Be Hunted Down From Virginia to Pennsylvania. The folks at the Fairfax, VA A.C. Moore, who did the actual hunting for me, totally rock.


Aeolian, featured in the Spring 2009 issue of Knitty, is a popular one for sure (and if you look at the pictures with the pattern, you can see why)! This is the stuff I'm going to make it with, coffee blended to straw blended back to coffee.


Ever Green Knits knitted a lovely version in green, and was *very* happy to have it finished. (The post is called "Aeolian-Albatross".) Plus, if you search "Aeolian knit" in GoogleImages, you'll see lots of other lovelies (or just look at the projects page of the pattern in Ravelry).

I have THE prettiest sapphire-amethyst-emerald Claudia Hand Painted Silk Lace for Some Knitting Required's Pretty as a Peacock Shawl, which I've started twice and frogged due to Pattern Confusion. Being a much older and wiser knitter (by at least two, possibly three, years), I realize all my troubles could've been solved by the proper application of stitch markers. If you remember the UFO Friday shot of the Serenity Stroller Snuggie from two weeks ago, there were A LOT of stitch markers involved, and it's made that project go smoothly. I'm looking forward to starting this one yet again, now that I have Stitch Marker Skillz.


Fiddlesticks Knitting's Peacock Feathers Shawl is one of the Really Cool Shawls out there, and the first tricky (actual CHARTS! Eeek!) shawls I attempted. Sadly, this was quite some time ago, and I attempted it in baby-weight acrylic. Yes, you read that right. Acrylic lace. Thankfully, I was only to the third page or so when I realized it just wasn't working, so it got frogged out. (This is how you can tell I'm a process knitter; I had a grand old time knitting several hundred rows of a complicated lace pattern, and wasn't terribly upset to rip it out. My mother is a product knitter; she almost keeled over in a faint when she saw me winding the yarn back into a ball.) (Also, errata here.)

Holli's Go Fly a Kite has been in my queue forever, and somewhere in my house is the blue/gold yarn I mean to knit it up with. My house... it eats yarn. I don't know what it does with it, really!

Clapotis, from the Fall 2004 issue of Knitty, seems to be everywhere. Seriously. Other than my peeps at Nature's Yarn that do the Secret of the Stole stoles with me, this is the shawl I have seen most often in the wild, done by knitters I don't already know. ("Oooo! I love your Clapotis! What yarn is that?" is a great way to make new friends!) Mine is currently stalled here, in a small plastic bag:


I modified the Travelling Roses Lace Scarf by Leanne into a shawl by using bigger needles and adding a fluffy border. For no apparent reason, as soon as I'd hunted every Michael's in drivable distance to get enough Patons Lacette to finish this thing... the DOLLAR STORE near my gym decided to have a bushel-full. (*Sigh.*) Anyway, here it is, all finished, and being modeled by me last Easter:


The kit for Evelyn Clark's Pacific Northwest Shawl (which I got from Nestucca Bay yarns) just arrived recently, but I've wanted to knit it since I saw a navy blue one (no surprise, that's the color I got for my kit, too) about three years ago at Stitches East. I believe that the one I saw was actually THIS very shawl, by Glynda. (She's also done Peacock Feathers; hit the link, go look!!)


One of my few finished Fancy Shawls is Lilly of the Valley by Nancy Bush, published in Lace Style. It was fun to knit up, and I realize that I really, REALLY need to get a decent picture of it. And maybe get around to blocking it, too, now that I've got a set of interlocking blocking squares...


I'm modifying Toni M. Maddox's Tiger Eye Lace Scarf into a shawl. I have this AMAZING skein of Claudia Hand Painted Silk Lace in browns and blues and creams, and it told me it wanted to be in this shawl. Here's a shot of the lovely yarn, and a shot of the beginning of my shawl. It's actually quite a bit further along than in the bottom photo... but I kinda lost it in my house. I know it's there somewhere...




Forget-Me-Not by Shui Kuen Kozinski is lovely when finished, and the pattern isn't too hard, but tricky enough to keep me interested. And I have to be careful: I'm making it in HOT PINK MOHAIR. Seriously, I was insane when I started this shawl, but the yarn called to me, the pattern called to me, and I managed to buy enough that I can actually make a nice, large (but oh-so-light-yet-warm-and-fuzzy) shawl. Projected completion is some time in 2011.


So, there are some of the things I like; please share your favorites!