Pattern Release: Foglie e Cardi

The shawl pattern I released today has been nearly a year and a half in the making -- a long time even by my slow standards. It started with the lace design class I took with Kirsten Kapur last April. After that class, I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but it was months before I started putting together all the pieces. It was one of those projects that I'd pull out and work on excitedly for a while only to have to put it on the back burner when something else came up. This cycle continued for maybe a year. Finally, earlier this spring, just before MDSW, I finished the charts and knitting the sample from them, and I wore the shawl to the festival. It took several more months to get my hand-written charts into my charting program, generate and clean up the written directions, and put the pattern through several rounds of tech editing. But, after all that work, at long last, it's ready to share with you.

Foglie e Cardi is a top-down triangle shawl, and it starts with a garter tab. The meaning of the name is "leaves and thistles" in Italian, and those two motifs are featured prominently in the lace patterns. The first pattern (and the majority of the shawl) is made up of a small leaf stitch pattern. It transitions into a thistle stitch pattern and finally to a border. The lower edge of the shawl can be pinned out into points, as you see in my sample, or blocked straight, depending on your preference.

The lace stitches themselves are not difficult -- there are no knitting gymnastics here! However, I will note that the stitch repeat moves around a bit in the thistle section, so if you're the kind of knitter who likes to use stitch markers between pattern repeats, you'll need to be aware that there may be a lot of shifting of markers in this section.

The shawl uses fingering weight yarn; I used Done Roving Yarns Frolicking Feet for my sample. This yarn is a two-ply superwash wool that comes in very vibrant colors (the color I chose is Cloverleaf). Any fingering weight -- or even laceweight -- yarn will work for this pattern. You'll need somewhere in the range of 450 yds. to complete the shawl.

This pattern was a lot of work, but I couldn't be happier with the result, and I'm so excited to finally be able to share it with you!