Silverbells Shawl!!!

Well, it's taken me much longer than I initially anticipated but my latest shawl design, Silverbells Shawl is now available for purchase via Ravelry!  This is a triangle shawl that is smaller (re: shawlette sized), but can be made larger by increasing the number of chart repeats.  I was inspired to design this shawl by a friend knitting a shawl in Malabrigo Silky Merino.  The yarn just looked and felt soo yummy, that I knew I needed to design/knit a shawl for myself using it.

The shawl was knit on a US 7 (4.5 mm) needle using just under 2 skeins of the Silky Merino.  If you are wanting to make a larger shawl, then definitely have a third skein.  If you plan on knitting a separate gauge swatch, then definitely buy a third skein. I was really torn trying to determine if I should have added my usual yarn "fudge" factor when listing yarn for the pattern, but in the end I went with how much yarn I used exactly.  I normally add this fudge factor to try to account for differences in gauge because nothing is worse than running out of yarn for a project.  However, for this shawl I didn't want people to have to buy a whole third skein and only end up using a little bit of it.

The pattern includes both written and charted instructions.  Pattern is downloaded as a 4 page pdf that is ~800 kb.  This shawl is definitely a quick knit - perfect for yourself or as a gift!  Of all my shawls, I think that this one is probably the best so far for a true shawl novice.  If you've been scared to try out a shawl on your own, then please give this one a try! 

The following stitches are used: knit, purl, yarn over, & sl1 k2tog psso.  That's it! The trickiest part of the whole shawl is probably the garter stitch cast-on, but there are a lot of great tutorials out there on that -  Stephen West has a great photo tutorial here.  A quick search for videos will also turn up some great videos demonstrating the garter stitch tab cast-on.