Knitting Kninja

I’d hoped to have the pattern for my new shawl ready for test knitting by today, but unfortunately, I still have a little way to go.  It’s mostly ready, though, so yay!  I just wanted to make two options for size and while the charts are ready, I figured it would be handy for knitters of all stripes if I had written out instructions as well.

My sister kindly modeled for me to get some shots of the finished piece.  I may need to shoot her again (wow, does that sound creepy!) but in the meantime, enjoy!

At this point, the shawl is tentatively called Clothilde (pronounced kloh-TEELD).  My naming process for knits involves a combination of sheer nerdery and a certain randomness.  I tend to start with a basic impression that I personally get from the knitwear.  In the case of Pauline, for example, it reminded me vaguely of something a flapper might wear.  I knew I wanted to use a feminine given name for it, and so I looked at names that were more common among the girls born in the early nineteen hundreds.  To make sure it evoked a particular time (and this is terribly subjective, to be honest) I looked for a name that was not nearly so popular after that period.  Pauline leapt out at me as a name that sounded cute and spunky and old fashioned, so I used it for the hat.

In this case, the lace of the shawl reminded me of spearheads.  I saw the long columns of gull wing lace coming down into points that were more triangular at the top and then took on a more organic teardrop shape, and in the colors I used, both of which remind me of metal, it made me think of spears.  I still wanted a feminine name, I thought, so perhaps one that evoked the spears.   I preferred a Latinate name or an Turkish one, because the shapes also reminded me of Spanish or Turkish tiles.  Unfortunately, most of the names I found referring to spears were Germanic or Celtic, and on top of that, Gertrude (“spear of strength”) just didn’t sound right for my shawl.  So I expanded from the spears and went for something warlike, which is how I came to Clothilde (still Germanic in origin, but Francofied on its entry into France).  All names ending in -hild or -hilda are feminine Germanic names referring to war.  Many of these names sound very heavy in English (Gunnhild, Reinhild, Irmhild, Brunhilde) but there are some, like Matilda, that have been softened by passing through a few languages and iterations.  When I came to Clothilde (“famous battle”), I felt like I’d found a good fit.

This isn’t my favorite picture from the shoot, but it gives you a pretty good idea as to size.  This is really a very large shawl, but even in the DK weight yarn, it’s light enough to be worn comfortably in a variety of different ways.

Like so.

I’m writing up the pattern for the large size and for the small shawlette size I made with the sock yarn.  I am leaving in the improvements I made in the charts, so the written version will not be identical to the small shawlette pictured here, but the size will be very similar.  I don’t know if the differences between the large and the small are clear in these photos, but all the changes happen around the center “spine” stitch, and it’s a matter of placement as regards the spearhead shapes, which I think is much improved in the large size version.

While the changes won’t be enormous, I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking that it will be exactly the same as the shawl pictured here.

May I mention again how very much I love this color?  Good heavens!  It is glorious stuff.

You can click through on any of these pictures to get to my Flickr stream, where there are a few more photographs.  I’ll keep working on the pattern and get it out to my test knitters as soon as possible.