Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Upon completion of the Danish Sea Shawl, I started seeing how small variables affected the outcome.  Changing up at the 1/3 point can do that for you, yanno?  On speaking with a customer at the shop that's larger than I am, we discussed how she sought a shawl that had more front-coverage than the typical flat-edged shawl.  All I could do was to (1) tell her I may have a solution, (2) offer her the Danish Sea Shawl, (3) doodle for her the full-Danish option, (5) ask her to come back after the 2nd shawl had been completed.

Almost side-by-side shots of both shawls being worn (by me) to follow. (At the smallest iteration of photo blogspot will allow me, they're still too wide to fit next to each other.  And I'm really not feeling a bout with PhotoShop at this time of night.  Maybe later... Problem fixed by tinkering with blog dimensions jan2011.)

For some reason, both shawls sit lower in the photo than they normally do.  Generally the blue shawl sits so that the edges are a 1/2 inch below the black band of my tank top.  With wear, the green shawl tries to climb up my shoulders so that there's a bit of a roll of fabric near the neckline.  It took a good tug outside both shoulders & then at the tip of the bottom to get it to sit perfectly like that.

Anyway, right off the bat, you can see that the neckline of the blue is more open than that of the green.  That comes from the accidental batch of slower increases at the center/beginning of the blue shawl.  The next shawl won't be quite as wide as that, but you get the idea of what I'm going for.  The stripes on the green shawl come from the alternation between yarns.  The single skein of CashSilk created the top triangle on the blue shawl.

In the last post, I referred to the green shawl as the "RealTree Camo Wind Armor".  If you've known a southern hunter within the last decade or so, you know what I'm referring to.  If you don't, "RealTree" is the brand name of a specific kind of camoflauge that uses a print that looks like, well, real trees.

It's not the awkward blotches of old school military forest camoflauge, but a more highly patterned print that ostensibly breaks up the visual field allowing blahblahblaBLAHblahblaaarg.  You get the point.  It's a name brand camoflauge that markets to humans, not to deer.  But it seems to be fairly effective against a background of Eleagnus bushes...

The "Wind Armor" part comes from the fact that the whole thing was knit with DK to worsted weight yarns held double on (mostly) a size 9 needle.  It's practically thick enough to stand up on it's own, and works well as a shield against the autumn wind generated by riding around the Lowcountry in a convertible.

Being a single, my spare bed isn't large enough for me to get a good single shot of the shawl spread out over a neutral background, so I offer you a slightly curled photo...

Here you can see how it curls up into a more heart-like outline.  The tie-cords were again crocheted chains braided together then knotted at the end.

Next up on the shawl docket will most likely be a brown shawl made of my mother's frogged Moebius.  She initially wanted something that looked like a fur, and the buttonholes *totally* wrecked the effect.  After trying on both the blue & the green, she OK'd a re-work of my first shawl for her.

Until then, I work on projects to send to Kitty.