FO: Alberta Shawl

One of my aims for this year, is to make a bit more of a dent in my stash of laceweight and sock yarn.  So, inspired by a friend of mine, I’ve decided to copy her idea and start an A to Z of shawls.  It’s a pretty simple idea: pick a pattern from my ever-growing queue on Ravelry that starts with the appropriate letter, match yarn to it and get knitting.

First up, is Alberta.  
The pattern is by Anne-Lise Maigaard.  It is based, in part, on the famous  designs by Herbert Niebling.  Niebling is known as the father of modern lace knitting.  He collected and documented traditional lace knitting patterns, and they are still used as the inspiration for modern patterns.

Despite the complexity of the design, this was a surprisingly easy and fast shawl to knit.  There is a lot of interest in the design, which made me really want to keep picking up my needles to make progress.

The yarn is Sparkleduck‘s Harmony, in a colourway called Rosemary Remembers.  It’s a 50/50 merino silk blend, which I bought at Festiwool.  It’s quite a subtle colourway, but I love the bright flashes of violet and lime green that pop through it.  To me, they are suffragette colours, which is one of the things that drew me to this skein of yarn in the first place.

It turned out I also had the perfect beads in my stash too.  These are a 6/0 bead in a pretty pink with an AB coating.  That iridescent AB coating perfectly matches the variegation in the yarn.  The weight of the beads also adds a lovely drape to the shawl.  I used around 62g of beads in all (of the 66g that I had), and was panicking that I was going to run out of them – these were not the most uniform of beads, and I had a lot of mishapes and discards to get rid of.

But I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out.  Onto the letter B …