A cute little scarf and a small shawl that feature traditional Estonian lace design elements. The scarf would be perfect to use up a skein of precious hand-dyed sock yarn or this 50 grams of luxurious lace yarn that’s been sitting in your stash for a while now. The shawl needs a bit more yarn, of course, but if you choose a fine fingering weight 100 grams will see you through.

Hearts in Estonia Scarf
The example scarf was worked in one skein of sock yarn on 4 mm needles to achieve a pleasing open fabric. You can actually choose any yarn you want for this pattern and a matching needle size. In a very fine yarn on smaller needles it will turn out a bit narrower. But hints for adjusting the repeats to get a wider scarf or even a stole are included. The length is adjustable, too.

This scarf is worked in two directions. It starts with an edging and a border sequence which are then put on hold. Next the edging and border sequence are worked a second time followed by the body part of the scarf for as long as you want your scarf to be. In the end both parts are grafted together. This way you not only have matching mirror images of the border but can also make the most out of a limited amount of yarn.

Hearts in Estonia Shawl
This shawl is worked from the lower edge upwards which means you start with casting on a considerable amount of sts. It starts with an edging and a border sequence and then moves on to a solid body in the Estonian star pattern the number of sts continually decreasing as you go.

The shawl pattern has been prototyped in two different yarns: Filcolana Lammeuld (100 grams/600 meters) and Zitron Filigran (100 grams/600 grams). Even though they’ve got the same yardage they are as different as day and night. Filcolana is a lofty, wooly, Shetland type of yarn that works up into an open but still very substancial fabric even on 4 mm needles. Zitron Filigran is a dense, smooth and very inelastic singles yarn that creates a much more open and ethereal fabric even on the smaller 3.75 mm needles. Personally I really didn’t care much for working with this yarn but after blocking it turned out nice and it seems to hold the shape well. In the finer Zitron yarn I was able to work 7-sts nupps and still ended up with a few grams of leftovers. While with the Filcolana I stuck to 5-sts nupps and made the cast-off with just a couple of meters to spare.

Yardage
Scarf: 400 to 450 meters, more if you like to make it longer
Shawl: about 600 meters of fine fingering weight yarn, a bit less for cobweb, more for a heavier yarn especially if worked with 7-sts nupps. I’d estimate between 800 and 1000 meters if worked in a heavy fingering weight yarn on larger needles.

Special techniques required

• Estonian nupps (bobbles) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRGVsd3Hy4M
• grafting together two pieces of knitting in stockinette stitch
• reading charts

Note
Since I’ve had a complaint about the lack of originality of this pattern and accusations of plagiarism I’m adding this note to clarify things. This pattern was inspired by the Miralda shawl from Nancy Bush’s book ‘Knitted Lace of Estonia’. I thought the construction was very rewarding and loved some of the other basic lace patterns from the Estonian knitting tradition. So I sat down and brought those puzzle pieces together, figured out the stitch counts and made up some charts and instructions. It is surely not rocket science to do so and if you are an experienced lace knitter you would probably be able to work your own shawl from above mentioned book and without spending money on this ready made pattern.

Thank you for purchasing this pattern and enjoy the nupp madness :-)