Curious Collective 2014 Shawl.

Do you remember this photo from last month, this is all that I could show you at the time as I was test knitting for Helen Stewart, the pattern was released yesterday so here's what I was working on.

It's the Curious Collective 2014 Shawl as I explained on yesterday's post, this design is a little bit different, as part of the Curious Handmade Group on Ravelry we had some input into the design of the shawl, we got to chose the colour, the shape, and stitch patterns.

It's a fairly large crescent shape shawl using two colours, starting off with a simple garter stitch body with some lace and cable stitches.

I used 70g of Artesano 100% Alpaca 4ply for the main colour and 40g Juno Fibre Arts Alice in Second Sight, the Juno was actually leftover from a previous project so is a great way to use up a part skein. Again this pattern was really well written and simple to follow as are all of Helen's designs.

It's only a two stich cable so there's not really any need to use a cable needle which makes it much quicker, you can find a good tutorial here, for knitting cables without a cable needle.

I also mentioned there's a fun Knit Along going on over on the group called Curious Collective 2014 DKAL, it's a little bit different from your usual KAL, as all the colour choices were very popular and it was very close on the voting, Helen thought it would be fun to pick your colour combo and chose a tribe which best suits your colours.

The choice of tribes are Space Chic, French Vintage, English Rose, Enchanted Forest, and Art Deco, you can find out more about the colours and which tribe to join, here and here. Once you've picked your colours, which don't have to be the colours suggested, you can use any brand or colour yarn that takes your fancy, for instance the colours I've chosen would go well as part of the French Vintage tribe so I could request that team and get started chatting and interacting with my fellow team mates. There are some great prizes to be won including a Social Media Maven prize so whenever you show photos/talk about your project on social media use the hashtag #CCDKAL to be in with a chance of winning. The pattern is available to purchase here.

I also wanted to show you how I blocked mine to get the beautiful scalloped picot edge, after soaking for 30 minutes, lay your shawl out onto your bed or foam squares pinning the top to get the crescent shape, then pin every picot bind off point, it is time consuming but worth the effort to get the nice sharp points.

I'm linking to KCCO over on Nicole's blog Frontier Dreams.

Happy Knitting

xxxxDebxxxx