Take a closer look at the three-dimensional flowers on the broader end of this shawl. You probably think they’re a crochet appliqué stitched on the knitting after the fact, right? Well, they are crochet, but they’re worked while you’re knitting, without cutting the yarn. If you’ve worked a crochet bobble in the middle of a knit row (a popular technique in Japanese stitch dictionaries), it’s very similar, but instead of making a bobble you’re crocheting a flower in the middle of the row.

The unusual shaping of this shawl is a shape of my own invention, which I call a “diamond kite”. This shape is symmetrical along the vertical axis, and there are decreases along the outer edges to slow the rate of increases while creating some internal biasing. A typical diamond kite scarf will gain two stitches every four or five rows. The biasing of this construction is great for showing off bold variegated yarns. I like to cast-on for these pieces by using a circular cast-on, but instead of redistributing the stitches to work in the round, I turn to work flat. It cinches in the cast-on at the tip to look pointy, but I think it’s a bit tidier than doing a single slip knot and then doing a bunch of increases into it.

The name is German for “spring blooms/flowers”, and it uses the diminutive form, a.k.a. what you do to make a word cuter. And this compound word also has two umlauts, which makes it that much cooler.