Kokopelli shawl

At last the pattern is ready! From a flicker of an idea, watching the Breaking Bad box set back in January until now it has been a learning curve on so many levels for producing a pattern that is good enough to sell. If you're just knitting an item for yourself you'll  just make minor or major adjustments to extra/ missing stitches and not really worry about it. That's just how I knit, bit of a free spirit, knit and see, oops, no-one will notice kind of thing. You can't do that if you want someone else to be able to understand what you're doing and replicate it. So the challenge was set.

The actual knitting was the easy bit of this, the technical side was a nightmare. You look at it so hard, you can't see the issues after a while. I knitted the pattern through 3 times before I sent it out to my brilliant test knitters and they both came back (as instructed to be brutal) with loads of errors!

 But after much editing it's as good as it can be. There is bound to be a small error in there, I'm only human after all. I was so nervous about releasing it, but some of you so have had enough faith to purchase it and I can't wait to see what colour schemes are going to emerge. 

If you read my blog you'll know I'm a colour junkie so it was important to produce a pattern that could be colour interpreted in any way the knitter sees fit. As seeing what others have created with this pattern and put their own spin on it is the most exciting aspect for me. I can spend hours (as we all can) on Pinterest just soaking up lovely yarns, shawls and colours that bobble about in my brain until they sometimes take form and become something new.

I do always find I need a jumping off spot. For my edge of Harmony scarf it was the colours in Lucy's border for her harmony blanket. They just got lodged in my brain and wouldn't come out until I'd made them into something.

This time it was this lovely artwork above that I found on Pinterest and that's how it all started. I'm sure you can see the design elements and colours in the shawl. Finding a stitch pattern that matched the triangles was difficult. For crochet that was easy but harder to produce from a knit stitch. But I did find one, shell stitch,  not too bad once you understand the concept.

But being a lazy knitter it was designed to look way more complicated than it really is, the colours do most of the work for you. But it is worth putting in the shell (triangle stitch) as it really does add something unusual to the border. 

I think it would look really nice worn like this over a dark Winter coat bringing brightness to Winter days.  Please if you do knit one, remember to add it to the ravelry page where they can all be admired and hopefully inspire some amazing colour combinations.

You can buy it here Ravelry  or here in my Etsy store