5: Travelling Woman, by by Liz Abinante
Ever since I saw this shawl, inspired by the character Angela Montenegro from the show Bones, I wanted to knit it. The lace is the easy-to-read horseshoe pattern, and I love the transition to the lacier edging.
The pattern provides the math for figuring out when to stop if you're knitting a larger or smaller stockinette portion. Since I knit nearly a whole ball of yarn before I transitioned to the lace pattern, I needed this. I knit three repeats of Chart A and then one of Chart B and had maybe 20 yards of yarn left when the bind-off was done.
Because you stop increasing in the center of the triangle during the lace portion, the strong triangular lines are blurred into a softer arc at the center. The edge conditions for this pattern were near-perfect, with the edge yarnovers blending themselves into the lace pattern.
The yarn is more Socks That Rock in Lightweight, in the colorway Count Cluckula. This may be my only regret - while I do like the end result of the shawl, the colorway is extremely variegated. From a distance, I see a blur of peach, grey, and green more than the brilliant red that attracted me to the yarn in the first place. Two skeins made a shawl that is well past my wingspan (70") and ties nicely around my shoulders.
I think I will be knitting this again, in a more subdued color set. Like My Blue Heaven, a fantastic swirl of blue and green.
I'm halfway to my goal of 10 shawls in 2010. The next one is my own pattern, and then I'm in the process of knitting another one from a pattern. I think I will be alternating my own pattern tweaking with pattern knitting... the next patterned one will be beaded in green alpaca.