Star Flower Shawl design process

I wore my Star Flower Shawl for the first time yesterday. It went perfectly with my new dress. So happy! This shawl was in the works from spring until fall; it took a long time to work out all the details.

I always say that as a designer, I make the mistakes so you don’t have to. They’re not really mistakes, though. They’re choices, depending on what I think looks good, and what I think is easily explainable and repeatable.

Dream in Color Smooshy, Tip Top Tangerine and Sonoran Magic

I chose these colors for an assigned pooling shawl. I planned to base it on my Aloha Shawl, with a contrast color floral triangle that moved into alternating sections of pooling and an accent stripe in contrast color. I thought this would be a simple design process. Nope.

The yarns have a nice tonal contrast with each other. But the colors in the applied pooling skein didn’t have a lot of tonal contrast with each other.

My first attempt told me that the pink flowers were lost on a stockinette stitch background. I could also see that my floral stripe was too bold, and stole the show from the assigned pooling.

I noticed on the back side of the fabric, the star/flower popped better against the reverse stockinette stitches, but I wouldn’t want something as dense as reverse stockinette on the right side of the shawl. Garter stitch was my next best choice. Also, I wouldn’t want the beginning and end of the wrap to be so prominent, so we’d have to begin and end the wraps on the wrong side of the fabric. Okay! I also made the flower bands smaller.

I knit nearly the entire shawl before realizing that I’d never like the smaller floral bands after blocking; they wouldn’t be round enough. They looked like columns with headers and footers, and would not be improved by blocking.

(No picture because it was late at night when I had this epiphany, and I wanted to frog it immediately.)

So I frogged back to the first floral stripe, and opted for this one instead. It’s an old favorite that I’ve used on several previous designs (Sophie’s Rose, Aloha Shawl, Nymphaea, Embellishment Cowl). I wasn’t planning to have so many features in common with Aloha, but it was the best choice.

I wasn’t sure I’d like this shawl until after blocking, but I forged on, and fell in love with the finished piece. So pretty!

I wanted to knit one more with a more contrasty applied pooling yarn, and also to double check my stitch counts for the lacy edging. It was then that I discovered that I didn’t like the star flowers to have garter ridges on the front of the fabric when there was this much tonal contrast (ridges depend on if you start the star flower on the right side or wrong side, wherever the pooling color begins).

So I changed my draft pattern to have the garter ridges fall to the wrong side of the fabric. Much better. I was knitting this version on a camping trip to see the Perseid meteor showers, and suddenly this piece became the night sky. Stars, trailing meteor streaks, the contrast bands as the Milky Way. Which made me want to rip the whole thing out again so I could have the extra color pop all to one side of each star flower like a shooting star, instead of centering the flower in the color pop with color running out to each side. But NO, it really wasn’t worth knitting the whole thing over again. You can do it that way, if you want to.

So my Star Flower Shawl could also be Meteor Shower/Perseids. Knitters’ choice!