This was a fun, fast project knit for a lady who works at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture. My son who is a student there called and asked if I would knit a prayer shawl for her since she recently lost her mother. He told me that she wears a lot of purple and the only yarn in my stash that came close was a grape jelly colored DK weight yarn from KnitPicks. It’s bulkier than what was called for in the pattern but turned out lovely anyway. My son delivered the shawl and she loved it.

Flash forward six years and I finally got to meet the lady that I knit the shawl for at my youngest daughter’s graduation from Cornell. She hugged me and told me how much that shawl meant to her and how it comforted her so much that she gifted it to a friend who needed comforting. My heart was very full hearing that.

I modified the pattern slightly because I had 3/4 of a ball of yarn left when I had 18 stitches on either side of the short row markers and it was clear that I would have a lot of yarn left over. Instead of incorporating 4 stitches into the body I started incorporating just 2 stitches. It used up all but about a 1/2 yard of yarn which made me pretty happy and made the shawl slightly deeper.

I will definitely use this pattern again. It was much more pleasant to knit a strip and pick up stitches than to cast on 300+ stitches and work up.

Thanks Jackie for a beautiful pattern!