Birthday Tickets! Shawl Workshop with Stephen West. The workshop was a pleasure, and we got a preview of the soon-to-be-released Iberian Discovery Shawl, a large curved affair with strong lines emphasized by welts, rustic yarn and an earthy masculine palette.

I knew right away that I wanted to paint my own yarn for the project in an earthy palette of oranges I’d seen climbing the sides of desert canyons.

Back home, I found just the right mill end: a cashmerino of very high quality, but with a matte finish with the same rustic feel as Pioneer. My yarn was DK rather than worsted, so I made the first deliberate mod & scaled up the design by performing 24 rather than 16 repeats of the two short row sections. The only other mod I made was to knit the fourth section in stockinette rather than garter stitch. The first section is also stockinette and ends in a welt, so I was happy with the way it fit into the design.

The paint pattern: I assumed one skein would form the body of the shawl, while the second skein would be used almost entirely to form the wide border.

I began the first skein with a quick self-striping section, then an ombre to the end, the second skein I painted in a long smooth double ombre in the same color family. I stuck to a very tight palette and took it in several different directions: red, gold, tan, and brown, all mixed with earthy rather than floral oranges.