This is a complex, well-written pattern that makes a huge and beautiful shawl. What really sets it apart is its wide band of elaborate stranded colorwork, with a tidy knitted facing to protect and hide the floats. The notch in the neckline together with the end panels mean that it stays on when you wear it, and the extra weight in the hem (from the beads) makes it drape beautifully.

81” wide x 41” deep (206 x 102cm), relaxed after blocking.

This is a challenging knit, probably not for a beginner unless you’re extremely adventurous. The lace is patterned on both sides, and for most of the shawl each row requires you to switch between charts as you go along. This is not hard to do, but if you’re not comfortable with charts it could be a bit overwhelming. The stranded section as written is worked flat, includes intarsia, requires more than two colors per row in some places, and incorporates a lot of beads. It’s a challenge.

Since I had a new kitten in the house, I decided to simplify the stranded section. No way was I going to work with dangling bobbins or more than one color in each hand while wrangling a playful kitten! So I dug around in my collection of knitting books and found a sort of abstract hearts/crowns motif, which when adapted and worked upside down looks to me like the old-fashioned spring flowers known as bleeding hearts. I worked this motif across the entire width of the shawl. It was definitely easier this way (although under different conditions I would have enjoyed tackling the colorwork as written).

I beaded all the lace as written, and I worked the Primrose Lace edge with beads. The pattern calls for 8/0 Delica beads, but I didn’t have any Delicas and I do have tons of seed beads, so that’s what I used. I had to use 6/0 beads to fit them on the WM. Makes the beads quite a bit more obtrusive than in the sample, but I like lots of shiny beads! I have no idea how many I used, since I poured a bunch of leftovers into a tin and used them at random, but it was a lot. Probably not as many as the patterns says you’ll need, though, because I elected not to do the heavy beading called for in the colorwork section.

I went up two US needle sizes to work the stranded section, and I worked it loosely to allow for stretching, because I wanted to be able to block the lace hard. I went back down one size when I worked the facing in plain stockinette (no stranding), but I knitted it loosely also. They stretched nicely when blocked.

Blocking was a serious proposition. This shape blocked quite easily, without a lot of back-and-forth adjusting, but it’s HUGE, so I used both sets of knit blockers, both boxes of T-pins, and had to resort to regular sewing pins to finish the job! It was a LOT of pinning. But blocking is always worth the effort.

My yardage seems really high, and I’m wondering if I didn’t have accurate quantities recorded for my yarn at the beginning. I always try to weigh my yarn before I start a project, but I was in quite a fog when I started this one, so it didn’t happen. If you’re thinking about making this, you should take my yardage figures with a grain of salt.

Note: I finally learned ladderback jacquard for this project, and I tried it out in a few places in my stranded section. I discovered that, no matter how much slack you leave in your yarn, the stitch that “anchors” a ladder gets stretched and makes an ugly hole unless you twist it. I’m glad to know it; just wish I had figured it out sooner.