Saltarello is a top-down, fingering-weight triangular shawl featuring an all-over lace pattern of diamonds and chevrons that flow into each other like beautiful waves. Graceful mesh lace with scalloped points adds a lovely finishing touch to the border edge. With so much openwork in the elegant lace design, Saltarello is the perfect cover up for cool spring and summer nights.

This shawl knits up very quickly for a fairly large triangle due to all the yarn-over action. Both newer and experienced lace knitters will appreciate how intuitive the stitch patterns are to knit, with easy-to-memorize, 14-stitch pattern repeats. And it’s so easy to block due to the shaping increases being all yarn overs.

The Saltarello pattern includes both charts and full written out instructions for those of you who prefer not to use charts.

Saltarello is named after a medieval dance that involved a great deal of leaping (“saltare” means “to leap” in Italian). The name is used interchangeably for both the dance and the fast, lively music that accompanied it. For the past few months, I’ve started each morning playing my mountain dulcimer for about an hour before I begin my work day. I particularly love playing medieval music, as it is well suited to the instrument. As I was learning two different “Saltarello” pieces, I was inspired to design a shawl with a lace pattern that was as lively as the music itself. Saltarello’s interlocking motifs have a visual sense of movement that is my interpretation of the quick rising and falling melodies of this dance music.

Construction: Saltarello starts at the center back of the neck and is knitted top down to the scalloped bottom edge. There is a 2-stitch garter border at the beginning and end of every row. A 2-stitch stockinette spine separates each half of the shawl. Four yarn-over increases—adjacent to the garter borders and two center stitches—shape the triangle on the right-side rows. All wrong-side rows are purled between the two-stitch garter borders.

Yarn Info and Sizes: Because there are so many yarn overs to break up any potential pooling, Saltarello would be a lovely shawl to knit up with a more variegated hand-dyed yarn than one would usually choose for lace knitting. Solids, tonal, speckled, tweed, gradient--all would look fabulous. The purple sample was knitted with Three Irish Girls Congdon Merino Silk in the Summer Magic colorway; the pink sample was knitted with Kim Dyes Yarn Napoleon Sock in the Coreopsis colorway. Both samples were merino/silk blends.

Listen to Medieval Music! Links to both versions of Saltarello as well as some other beautiful medieval pieces I love are included on the pattern.

Heartfelt thanks to my wonderful friend and test knitter Paula Feldmann, who knitted the fabulous pink sample pictured here.