Swan Shawl [Part 0] – New Project!

I’ve recently picked up a new project!

It’s called the Wild Swan Shawl and the pattern can be found here on Ravelry.

I’m still working on the Aran sweater, and I have the sleeve, neckband, and seaming left to complete.

For the time-being, I’m putting that aside while I work on the shawl.

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Choosing the Pattern

Previous Experience

I’ve only done one shawl before, and you can see the project on Ravelry here.

It was a large (6 ft wide) triangular shawl with a few features:

• Simple repetitive lace pattern (continual yo, ssk)
• Scalloped edges with a shell-type pattern, making it look something like bat wings

I really enjoyed that pattern and still count it as one of my best outputs _{(even though it wasn’t perfect)}.

This Pattern

For this pattern (as with everything else I pick up), I was looking for some new challenge.

Filtering through some of the patterns on Ravelry, I ended up wanting some of the following:

• Large crescent- or triangle-shape, rather than entirely circular
• Visually including some pictorial elements (leaf or feather shapes, etc.)
• Not overly repetitive
• Higher difficulty

I landed on the Wild Swan Shawl because it satisfied these needs!

Looking at the pattern PDF, you can see that it’s almost entirely written up using charts, and this makes sense considering the very pictorial nature of the pattern that wouldn’t be capturable with words alone.

I’ve used charts before, but not to this level, so I thought this would be another good challenge.

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Choosing the Yarn

Typically, I’m not very adventurous in terms of yarn colors. For the most part, I use solid-color yarns and don’t prefer gradients, speckles, etc. However, this pattern seems to lend itself well to gradients, as it is knit from the center outwards. I asked around my knitting group for gradient yarns, and someone recommended looking at the yarn cakes from Hobbii to find good gradients.

After browsing a bit, I landed on Sultan (Kyanite) by Cotton Kings on Hobbii.

This should give a nice gradient from light periwinkle inside to darker royal blue/purple towards the edges.

Conveniently, this one yarn cake also has the right amount of yardage needed for the shawl, with some leftover.

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Let’s Get Started!

The charts in the pattern PDF are a bit intimidating, as they’re very large and don’t seem to repeat much.

Hopefully things will go smoothly once I get into it!