01/08

leaf and nupp shawl

Pattern: Leaf and Nupp shawl, from Knitted Lace of Estonia by Nancy Bush. I chose this pattern because the leaves in the lace pattern also reminded me of bluebells – a nice combination with the yarn, I thought.

Yarn: Posh Yarn Eva 2 ply cashmere/silk. This is the Bluebell colourway from Posh’s cashmere club. The colour is hard to capture, especially in the full sun in which these photos were taken. But it is a beautiful, utterly bluebell-y blue, with subtle tinges of lavender.

Needles: 3.25 mm

Notes: I spent this weekend at the wonderful Knitnation organised by the awesome Alice and CookieA. I’ll post more on that later, especially with details of my highly uncharacteristic stash acquisition (Wollmeise anyone??). But I also spent a day doing a workshop on Estonian lace making with Nancy Bush. I met some lovely people, and it was incredibly interesting hearing about this region’s history of making lace for the last couple of hundred years.

One of the things that I learned was that the nupps, that you can see in the photo above, work best in white yarn, because apparently light reflects differently on white than on any other colour. Which explains why they are not that prominent in my or other coloured versions, and made me think I’d like to try another nupp-based shawl in a natural coloured Shetland laceweight yarn.

I also wish I’d made the shawl larger, as it is really more of a large scarf size. Nancy Bush had a sample that she had knitted of the same pattern, in a pure Shetland wool, and it was much larger than my version. I hadn’t thought about it before, but once I saw the two together it was obvious that the silk content in my shawl made the yarn much less stretchier, and therefore block much smaller, than the pure wool shawl. Yet another reason to try a Shetland shawl!

And finally, just because a girl  in a sports car (yes, I am still harping on about our recent trip to France!) really ought to wear a headscarf, here’s one of me posing like mad…

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