Another one of my neck-down, every other row gets shorter shawls (I call them “hypotenuse” since that’s where you cast on), this time with a lace center instead of plain garter stitch.

A note on working this pattern:
On some of my other patterns that have lace on a garter stitch (all stitches worked as knit on right and wrong sides) ground some people have expressed confusion over the chart symbols because they are used to working from charts with lace on a stockinette (knitted on right side, purled on wrong side) ground. This design has lace worked on a garter stitch ground. The charts in this pattern show the knitting from the right side of the work. All chart symbols are to CYCA (Craft Yarn Council of America) standards and refer to standardized meanings. On the chart symbol key below, note that the symbol on the left is for the right side and the symbol on the right (with the gray background) is for the wrong side.
If you’ve never worked lace on garter stitch before it would be good to familiarize yourself with the concept prior to commencing the shawl. The simplest way to describe what this means is that on the right side a knit two together leans to the right, but its mate on the wrong side is a slip, slip, knit two together—conversely, a slip, slip, knit two together leans to the left on the right side, so is matched by a knit two together on the wrong side. Why is this note helpful? On the edging, the increase rows lean “out” away from the body of the shawl while the decrease rows lean “in” toward the body of the shawl. (This is also helpful for the left and right sides of the top rows of the fir tree motif.)
As the pattern gets under way, hopefully this little note will aid you in working from rote memory rather than having to continually check the chart from stitch to stitch on every row.