The weekend of the NEC trip, I got a project off the blocking board. It was a Lavalette Shawl, by Kirsten Kapur. I have liked this pattern for some time and finally decided to use it with my newly purchased Noro Sekku yarn.
I fell in love with this new Noro lace weight yarn as soon as I saw the sample at Mary Clare. It has a high content of cotton which gives the yarn quite a lot of strength. This would be a great yarn to use as a first attempt at knitting with lace weight as it feels like it won't snap if you pull to hard. It also has such pretty colours that you don't need to use a complex lace pattern to make something lovely. This is why I used the Lavalette Pattern.
I didn't stick rigidly to the pattern, which is pretty straight forward. I have learnt that I prefer shawlettes that have increases at the ends of each row rather than on alternate rows. This makes the shawlette wide and shallow, which means the ends of the shawl are less likely to uncoil when fastened. I listed the altered stitch counts for the end of each section on my project page, if anyone is interested.
I quite like the way the skinny ends of the shawl twist around to form a coloured spiral. Laid out, the resulting shawl measures around 64" wide x 20" deep. It ties quite easily around the neck as well, but I didn't take a photo of that.
My favorite sections are the eyelets which make the stripes of colour deeper. With the increased width of the shawl some of the outer rows have very shallow stripes of colour.
Back to the subject title - my sister in law clapped eyes on the shawl and tried it on. She fell in love and has requested this as her Christmas present. She wore the shawl all weekend and then handed it back. She wants it wrapped and under her tree or she will feel like she didn't get a present. I'm so pleased that she fell in love with this shawl as it is one less present to guess about. Normally I worry that I haven't matched the right project to the right person. Maybe I should email a photo catalogue in the run up to Christmas and everyone can chose their own present from those I've made?