Louiseluvsyarn: The Summertide Shawl

Hi everyone and I hope you have had a productive few weeks!

I thought I would share my finished Summertide Shawl with you today.

This shawl is a design by the lovely Helen Stewart of A Curious Handmade, which she designed as a mystery knit along. I do like mystery knit alongs, although a couple of times in the past I have been disappointed because people who have the time and knit very fast, have posted their finished objects when I am half way through! However this group of lovely Knitter's took heed of Helen's plea to keep social media sharing to a minimum so as to not give the game away and I managed to finish it without having seen a photo to spoil the fun!

Helen announced the winners of the KAL prizes last week on Periscope and so I feel safe enough now to write about it!!

I wanted to knit from stash and the requirement was for two colours. I really agonised about the choice because actually I don't have too much sock yarn in my stash!! (Or at least I didn't until my recent trip to A Yarn Story!!). So I decided to chose a Dubai Knits skein from the lovely Jocelyn which I had fallen in love with a few years ago - a beautiful pale mint colourway in a silk blend and something very different in a skein from Ripplescrafts which I bought last year on our trip to Scotland (see my previous blog post HERE) which is a deep blue with the most gorgeous tweedy 'nups'!

I was not 100% sure that they would complement each other, but nothing ventured, nothing gained right?

I waited patiently for the first clue, and I duly cast on in the evening of 17th September!

The first clue section of the of the shawl was garter stitch and I decided to start with the Dubai Knits yarn and was not disappointed! Not only is the colour gorgeous but the silk blend made the garter fabric super soft with a gorgeous drape. Jocelyn has not dyed this colourway since mine and I have already told her she needs to do more of this - it's just lovely for shawls!

The second clue arrived and this was still to be in the first colour. However we moved into lace and this clue took some concentration! I took the shawl with me to the UK on my trip to Bath and managed to finish this lace section in the hotel on the night before my early morning flight back to the desert. By this time I was a little behind schedule but decided there was no way that working full time and travelling to the UK in the middle of the KAL would make me an early finisher so I took that pressure off myself!

When I got back to the UK I started to work on the next clue and changed to the Ripplescrafts yarn. This was a complete contrast to the first yarn, but in a really good way! Stitch definition was great and I soon realised that the contrast in the yarn did in fact work very well! Again the lace needed some concentration but I began to motor through and really enjoyed knitting right to the end!

The shawl is a live,y size - medium sized I would say, which is going to make it extremely useful now that the weather in Abu Dhabi is finally cooling down!

Although I have been listening to Helen's podcast for a long while now, I had never knit one of her patterns (shame on me!) but I would thoroughly recommend them! Her instructions are super clear and I love the fact that she writes everything in a table and let's you know how far you have knit with her percentage system. In fact although I usually use a chart to knit lace shawls - this time I used the written instructions!

The whole experience has been a delight and I look forward to he next one Helen!!