This top down triangular shawl is knit with eight bands of mosaic motifs interspersed with a garter stitch here and there and finished with a wide border of stockinette/garter repeats at the bottom. The design starts with a small garter tab and then features two mirror image triangles that come together with a single stitch “spine” in the center. The bottom edge is finished with a double applied I-cord after the cast-off. Three little tassels, one at each corner, are the final icing on the cake.

Simple increases at the edges of each of the triangles on the right side increase the shawl naturally. Blocking helps set the patterns; final size in the sample shown here was 70” x 26”. Different sizes can easily be generated, if desired, by adding or subtracting to/from the border repeat at the bottom or altering the needle size. This pattern is appropriate for the intermediate knitter. Construction is pretty easy; there are no fancy stitches. The only challenging parts are being able to knit mosaic and being able to follow the 16 provided charts accurately. Please note that these patterns are ONLY charted, not written out. I provide short mosaic instructions that outline how to read and knit the first couple of rows of the first chart for newbies, but if you need more help than that, you will have to explore the wonderful world of YouTube. If you already have experience in knitting mosaic and following mosaic charts where every depicted row represents 2 rows of actual knitting/purling, then this baby will be easy-peasy for you!

This shawl’s design came about through my ongoing interest in exploring traditional or ethnic patterns using a bright and authentic color palette. I had an image in my mind of shawl with an incredibly bright pop of color and a rich complex pattern layered over a black winter coat seen outside on a dreary gray winter day. After knitting Fair Isle color-work for years, I decided it was finally time to explore mosaic knitting. As with Fair Isle, there will be yarn floats on the wrong side, so care must be taken not to pull these too tight. Unlike Fair Isle, only one yarn is worked at a time for two rows. The color-work comes in when some of the yarn on the left needle is slipped and not worked. I was put off for a long time by the garter stitch appearance in most mosaic examples I had seen, which is just not my favorite. Luckily, as I explored the technique and used it for several sock patterns, I found that it is certainly not mandatory to have a garter appearance when working a mosaic pattern. Thus, you will see that I have minimized that aspect here in this pattern, only using it occasionally to add just a bit of texture without overwhelming the different motifs. So, in other words, most right side rows are knitted and most wrong side rows are purled.

Yarn recommendations: Fingering yarns in solid or only slightly tonal hues in clear contrasting colors (hold them all together and squint at them—do some of them run together? If so, consider replacing). This is not the pattern for self-striping, speckled, or multiple color (Indie) dyed yarn.

I list the colors in the following text as I used them along with amount of yardage/weight used. As always, you are free to develop your own unique colorway. If you do that, make sure that your colors that will be used together in a motif have high contrast value so that the motifs can be seen. Most of the yarns used here are partial skeins so there is a great potential for some stash busting.

Materials: Yarn (all fingering weight) as seen in the pattern photos:

Red (Color A): La Jolla Hand painted yarn. 100% super wash merino. Color: Rogue.120 g or 420 yds. (exactly the entire skein used!)

Orange (Color B): Classic Elite Yarns, Yuri. 75% superwash merino, 25% nylon. Color: 5085. 40 g or 175 yds

Yellow (Color C): Classic Elite Yarns, Yuri. 75% superwash merino, 25% nylon. Color: 5050.25 g or 110 yds

Blue (Color D): Done Roving Yarns, Frolicking Feet. 100% super wash merino. Color: Dungaree Blue. 32 g or 132 yds

Violet (Color E): MadelineTosh, Tosh Sock. 100% superwash merino. Color: Vanilla Bean.21 g or 85 yds
Silver (Color F): MadelineTosh, Tosh Sock. 100% superwash merino. Color: Silver Fox. 21 g or 85 yds

Green (Color G): FyberSpates, Vivacious 4 Ply. 100% superwash merino. Color: 80606.8 g. or 60 yds
Size 2 (US) circular needles (or size needed to obtain gauge)

Small stitch markers. Make sure these are small and thin. After several starts, I ended up just using loops of contrasting color yarn as markers. Even my smallest plastic markers ended up stretching out the fabric too much and leaving an unsightly ladder.

Tapestry needle