hybridity

Why hybrid, you might ask.

Enamoured as I was of the Ishbel pattern, I wanted a bit of variety in my life.  (Very little, but still.  I hear every bit counts.)  So with my thinking cap in the vicinity, I started knitting away on the stockinette portion, changing things up by increasing only four stitches every two rows (i.e. no increases along the upper edges on the purl row).  This continued until I’d increased to 195 stitches.  Originally, I’d wanted to then knit the lily of the valley border and peaked edging charts from the Swallowtail shawl.  (And thus followed the directions for casting on the Swallowtail shawl, beginning with seven stitches and a border of two garter stitches along the top edge.)  When the time came, though, I was unsure how the nupps would fare with the fuzzy mohair, not to mention the inevitable horror of undoing a misplaced mohair nupp.

So I changed plans.  Somewhere in the back of my mind rattled the possibilty of “195″ and the Flower Basket shawl being somehow compatible.  I checked the pattern and — huzzah! — discovered I was right: 195 is indeed the number of stitches produced by six pattern repeats.  In the spirit of Ishbel, I knit five repeats of the flower basket pattern onto the stockinette body.

This was my fist time working with kidsilk haze — it is lovely stuff.  The silk gives the mohair such a nice bit of shine, which somehow made this color seem even more vibrant.  If only it weren’t so expensive …

Here are the details:

pattern: Ishbel + Flower Basket shawls

yarn: Rowan kidsilk haze (color 606: candy girl), 2.25 balls

needles: US7/4.5mm circs

started: March 25, 2009

finished: April 8, 2009

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