Lily of the Valley shawl

Last week I finished my Lily of the Valley shawl designed by Galina Khmeleva from the Summer 2004 issue of Knitter's.


The photos in the magazine were lovely, but after seeing it in person at the class I took from her last summer at Michigan Fiber Fest, I knew I had to make one for myself. Her sample was knit from Belisa Cashmere. I used one skein of 30/2 silk/angora (55%/45%) from Treenway Silks and size 2 (2.75 mm) needles. Galina says that the Russian knitters use dpn's to knit the Orenburg shawls, so I decided to try it out and see if the short length caused any problems. I used some rubber bands on the ends of the needles during the first 50 or so rows just to make sure the stitches didn't fall off the end of the needle, but found that it was nice not having to move stitches around (especially past the join on a circ) to get them into knitting position.

Galina also had issues with the way the pattern instructions were given in the magazine. The method she works short rows is different than what they printed, the way the charts are presented make it look like the lace is St st based instead of garter st and the entire last chart is totally incorrect. Here's a close up of the bottom corner worked with short rows Galina's way which is similar to the Japanese short row method. The trick to knitting the nupps is just to keep the yarnovers extremely loose. That way it's not as difficult to K5tog on the subsequent row.

Tomorrow...Spinning!