Lightwaves Shawl

I cast on Lightwaves Shawl designed by Susan Ashcroft, on the eve of St Patrick’s Day, after spending a wonderful day at the garden centre with my friend. I think my choice of colour was influenced by the shades of green and shamrock I was seeing everywhere.

After downloading the pattern, I joined the Stitchnerds group on Ravelry, and found reading the posts and looking at the colours and yarn choices used by other people who have knit this lovely shawl very helpful.

Lightwaves Shawl was one of those patterns that as soon as you see it, you want to knit it. Now and again, I find one of these patterns. With Lightwaves Shawl, I cast on at 8pm on 16th March, and had it finished, wet blocked, and ready to photograph on the 6th April. The pattern was a pleasure to knit and I loved working the short row waves.

Although the pattern was written for Baby Alpaca DK and Kauni 8/2 Effektgarn yarns on 4 mm needles I knew that I wanted to use 4-ply yarn to knit the shawl. After knitting a small swatch, I decided to use 3.5 mm needles to knit the shawl, I found the fabric to be too loosely knitted using 4-ply yarn with 4 mm needles. Last year I treated myself to a set of Addi-click Lace Long Tip circular needles and it was with glee that I chose the 3.5 mm tips and clicked them onto the click cord. They worked an absolute treat as I found having the long tip to be useful when I was knitting the wraps, particularly on the purl rows. The transition between the needle and the cord was smooth and only caught the odd time when my stitches were a little on the tight side.

I chose to use Artesano 4-ply Alpaca in the lovely deep racing car green – Guyana 2133. I only used 17g of this although, by the time I was switching to the colourwork section, my stockinette section wasn’t quite as big as stated in the pattern. It just felt easier to move to the colourwork section anyway, because it meant I had the correct number of stitches for placing the markers.

I chose Crazy Zauberball  Spring is Here for knitting the colourwork section. I only had 2g of this yarn left from my 100g ball by the time I was casting off, so I did cut it a little tight. I love the effect though. Really wonderful. The shawl is more beautiful than I had hoped it would be.

After working on 6 sections of wave lines with the ridges in between, I knew that the finished shawl would be too small. I worked on it until I had 11 sections of wave lines, finishing after knitting the A Waves. In my last two wave lines, my waves changed colour between the start and the end wave, but the ridge between them was the same colour from start to finish and that really helped to distinguish between the two wave lines.

I cast off on the 3 April and then wet blocked the shawl. I opted for a smooth edge at the top and soft points in the centre of each wave.

I don’t often knit a shawl but loved every moment of knitting this. I have a bottle green sweater that I think will be lovely with.

I had great fun photographing the shawl by the river in the woodland at Crawfordsburn with the viaduct in the background. We were lucky to have a lovely sunny day on the 6th of April, and the dappled light was wonderful.

Spring here in Northern Ireland feels very late this year, with the snow we had at the end of March, we still have some snow in our garden, so there is little sign of any \’green\’ in the woodland yet. Closer to the coast, it was a few degrees warmer, at around 6 degrees Celsius.

I look forward to knitting another of Susan’s beautiful shawl patterns soon. Just need to decide which!