Now available in both English and Portuguese (many thank to Lilian Sant´Anna Monteiro who translated)!

This is a tutorial for a Modified Garter Tab CO that eliminates the “bump” that develops on so many top-down crescent shawls, and also gives you pretty eyelets all along the cast on edge. It’s more of a “recipe” style pattern, but following the directions will give you a cute little mini shawl from just about 10-15 yards of any weight of yarn.

Take a look at these mini-shawls in the top photo. Both are crescent, worked in the same yarn and gauge. Both use a yo on the WS, and a kyok (k1, yo, k1 into the same st) on the RS, yet they have slightly different shapes.

The shawl on the upper left uses a traditional garter tab cast on. Notice how a little “point” forms? And notice how the knit sts look attached to the garter edge with no yo eyelets? Now look at the shawl on the lower right. There are eyelets all along the cast on (it’s not even all that obvious where the CO is), and there is no “point” or “bump”--just a nice, perfect crescent.

I developed this technique back in 2012 when I designed a crescent shawl (Sweet Caroline) and further refined it for subsequent crescent patterns like Shleeves.

After seeing more and more crescent shawls with the little bump near the cast on, and hearing many knitters lament them, I published this tutorial in the summer of 2016, and gave it away for free to my newsletter subscribers. Since then, I’ve had so many knitters thank me for sharing my work that I’ve decided to publish it as a free mini-shawl pattern independent of the newsletter.

Several designers have also contacted me over the past few years asking if it’s ok for them to use this technique. The answer is: Totally OK! I’m thrilled to share the joy of a bump-less crescent! If you want to reference or credit me (Mary Annarella/Lyrical Knits) for it, of course I’m absolutely thrilled that you are so amazingly awesome to do that, but it’s not a requirement--in the US, you can’t copyright a technique (only words), but giving credit is super cool.

Enjoy!