The Clapotis (/kla.pɔ.ti/) stole pattern by Kate Gilbert was released in the Fall 2004 issue of Knitty and became one of the first patterns to become trendy to knit at web-scale. Searching clapotis on google is a fun way to explore the state of knitting blogs circa 2004-2014.

The original pattern now has almost 24,000 projects on Ravelry, but it was released and became popular over 2 years before Ravelry even existed! 2004 was also several years before I was a knitter, so when Knitty announced the ClapotisFest ‘24 photo contest to celebrate 20 years since the patterns release, I decided to take the opportunity to finally make one!

I’ve only bought hand-dyed yarn once before, but part of the motivation for the contest is to promote indie yarn dyers, so I splurged on a skein of Miss Babbs Yowza (a superwash merino DK) in the Charmed colorway. The nice thing about Yowza is that it comes in nominally 460 yard / 225g skeins (mine was 230g), so it is possible to get a decent size Clapotis with a single skein. The Miss Babs weblog posted some suggestions on knitting a Clapotis in Yowza: Clapotisfest 2024 I did use a 4.5mm needle as recommended, but I knitted all of the increases for a wider but shorter stole than they recommended. When pinned out my finished Clapotis is about 19” x 49”.

The color changes in the yarn happen more frequently (every 3 stitches or so) than I expected. I’d normally avoid such noisy yarn, but I think it works well in this case. The colors give the purl side a woven effect. The rapid color changes along with the twisted and dropped stitches also help to make the pattern less boring than plain stockinette.

I started this project in the airport on a weekend trip to Indianapolis to watch my sister and brother-in-law run a marathon. They both ended up setting new marathon PRs (by 15 minutes!) and in the hotel room was a photograph of some yarn art in an almost identical colorway (see photo). I’ll take that as a good omen for my chances in the photo contest!

I used both tips from the pattern:

• On the RS, purl the stitch to be dropped (knit on the WS) – this will allow you to forgo the use of stitch markers

• On the WS, purl through the back loops of the stitches that were knit through the back loops on the RS – this gives neater edges once the stitches are dropped

(Though the “RS” and “WS” in the tips is reversed since the purl side is considered the RS in the rest of the pattern!)

I used 49 grams for increases; started the decreases with 50g left just in case (and I ended up with 5g leftover, so I could have done a few more straight rows).