I’ve played with a design-as-you-go shawl, incorporating a series of motifs and trims from several sources with some archaic soft, worsted weight pink yarn found at an estate sale. The shawl combines the candle flame stitch, a frill from 150 Knitted Trims by Lesley Stanfield, and a modular diamond motif from Patricia Werner’s Dazzling Knits: Building Blocks to Creative Knitting.

Certainly, a knitter can follow my “recipe” and create the same shawl. But the beauty of this shawl is its spontaneity. I finished one section, switched patterns before I got too bored with repetition, studied the lacing and drape, tried another pattern, and created something very unique. Yet not one stitch is an original design.

The finished size is approximately 60” wide by 30” from neck to bottom point. But the size (and yardage of yarn required) can change based on the gauge of your yarn and the number of repeats you choose for each section!