Shawl Shapes Design Workshop with Susan B. Anderson

~ Simple and clear instruction for creating and designing your own shawl from scratch!

Grab that languishing ball of fingering weight yarn or a favorite skein you’ve been saving for just the right project, your needles, and a pencil and away you’ll zip designing your very own shawl in one of 10 selected shawl shapes. In class you’ll get in-depth instruction on designing your own shawl, instructions on exactly how to create the shape you are going for be it crescent, triangular, long-ended for extra wrapping, half-hexagon, asymetrical, semi-circle, or more! Your shawl may have lace, garter stitch, stockinette stitch, many textures, stripes, beads, etc. The sky is the limit and you’ll leave with an excellent understanding of how to design your own shawl from scratch from cast-on to bind-off and everything in between. In class you will plan and start your own shawl design from scratch. No homework is required just bring your shawl yarn, needles and a pencil!

Skills needed:

Ability to knit, purl, and some experience with increasing and decreasing.

Provided in class:

• Different options for casting on the shawl
• Instructions in recipe form for creating 10 different shawl shapes
• Charts for several different stitch counts that can be included in your shawls
• Edgings – many clear options
• Cast ons and bind offs – many different options

Materials:

• Yarn: How big do you want your shawl to be? It’s really up to you how much yarn you’ll need!
  Here are some guidelines: 100 grams of fingering weight yarn with at least 400 yards (This could also be
  several balls of different colors.) OR 300-600 yards of a sport/DK/worsted weight yarn
• Needles and gauge: Find a gauge that will make your knit fabric have a nice drape. This is achieved by knitting at a slightly looser gauge than usual. These are my favorite needle sizes for shawl knitting and yarn weights:
  • For fingering weight: US size 5-7
  • Worsted weight: US 8 or 9
  • DK weight: US 7 or 8
  • Sport weight: US 6-7
• Optional: Beads and a flosser or a tiny crochet hook that fits through the bead and can pull the yarn well (to add beads to the shawl in the body, edging or on the bind off). Make sure the beads fit on the yarn you have selected. Bead size 6/0 will usually fit on fingering to sport weight yarn and you would need two 24 gram tubes of beads.