After a long, grey, snowy winter, purple prairie crocus by the thousands bloom in the hills behind our house. Wildflowers poke up through last year’s grass, raising fragile blossoms to the early spring sun.

The Crocus Blossom & Lily Shawl is worked bottom-up using the entrelac technique and Estonian Blossom stitch and Lily-of-the-Valley pattern to create a year-round representation of spring wildflowers. Size is variable by simply adding more tiers of blocks before working the finishing triangles and simple edging. If making a larger shawl, be sure to allow for more yardage of your chosen yarn.

Although the original was made using one skein of Handmaiden Fine Yarns Mini-Maiden, most fingering-weight yarns would be suitable, including those with some tonal variations in colour.

The pattern includes both charted and written instructions, and would be suitable for intermediate knitters.

Gauge is not important for this project.

Great care has been taken in preparing the instructions for this project; however, being only human, oversights may have occurred. If you find something wrong, or if you only have a question of interpretation, I would be happy to hear from you.

Note: The symbol ‘' is shown in the chart legend as ssk, and in the written directions as ‘k2tog tbl’. For the purposes of this pattern, they are interchangeable. Your stitch count will change from rows 7 to 17 in Block 1 to compensate for the extra stitches produced by the star stitch as the base of the flower.

Sincere thanks go to my lovely test knitter, jweston for all the hard work and help with the pattern notes. Without her this would have been much more difficult.

An error was found on the chart for Block 1 - 2 extra stitches in Row 11. The new pdf was uploaded today 2/15/13.
Happy Knitting!

March 10 - Version 3 uploaded today. Pattern notes were edited for clarity, chart keys added for all charts.