Tristano is a bottom-up, triangular lace shawl with a fancy faux cable spine and subtly textured stitch patterns. The shawl begins with an open mesh followed by a stunning swirled border. The body consists of delicate leaves that appear to be in free fall due to the placement of the decreases.

While dimensions and yardage are provided for both sport and fingering weight yarn, Tristano is designed so that it can be worked in just about any yarn weight. The size is very easy to customize either by using different yarn, changing the number of pattern repeats of the body leaf pattern, or both. Full instructions are provided, including how to calculate stitch counts for any size.

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

Construction Notes: Tristano starts at the bottom edge with the maximum number of stitches cast on. Four stitches are decreased per right-side row, with the shawl ending with a one-stitch bind-off at the neck.

Yardage: The yardage referenced above is for the fingering weight version (pictured in gray). The sport weight version (pictured in orange) worked at the pattern size used between 580-630 yards (530-576 m).

Needle Sizes: The needles sizes referenced above are used for the fingering weight version, with the larger of the two needles used for the cast on only. The sport weight version used one size larger each, more details on the pattern.

The design is named after my favorite song that I played used to play on the Celtic harp, which was “Lamento di Tristano,” a haunting Italian lament written in honor of the knight Tristan of Cornwall. His famously tragic love story with Isolde inspired the design elements in this shawl. According to legend, a hazel tree and a honeysuckle grew out of their adjacent graves. The tree and the bush intertwined their branches so that the lovers could never be parted. And so the swirly curves of the Tristano border resemble the tendrils of honeysuckle vines as they wrapped around the tree branches and the leaf motifs of the shawl body are reminiscent of the rounded leaves of the hazel tree.