Little balls of fluff

Just look what followed me home from Rubi & Lana the last time I was there...


It's RichMore 'Excellent Mohair (10 Count) Gradation' in colour # 116 , a sophisticated mix of blacks, silvery greys and truffle browns. These are fabulous little balls of fluff with long colour changes similar to what you see in the Noro range of yarns. Coincidentally, this is a Japanese yarn too, and, with 200m in each 20g ball, it just calls out to be knit into something fine and lacy.

I have to admit to having coveted this particular yarn for quite a while in a few of the colourways Paula has in stock, but when I finally spotted this one on the shelf it really was all over.

I knew straight away that I wanted to knit a lacy wrap with this yarn, but not a whole lot beyond that. So I decided to start out by searching for similar things which have been knit using this yarn, mostly in the hope of getting a feel for how the gradation might look in a finished wrap. There wasn't much out there, but I did stumble upon a real gem -- Cosmopolitan Purls' Blue Ridge Stole, which she is designing herself. Wow!

I briefly thought about using her stole as the inspiration to go ahead and design my own wrap, which in the image I have in my head would of course have to have a complementary lace edging knit on to each end of the main rectangle -- I even had a stitch pattern picked out to use for that main rectangle. I then came to my senses and realized that, as I've never actually worked a knit on edging like this before and have no idea how the stitch and row ratios work to make everything fit properly and look symmetrical, it might just be a good idea to use an actual pattern for my first attempt.

So I started leafing through some of my knitting magazines, and soon rediscovered Nancy Bush's "Madli's Shawl" in the Summer 2004 issue of 'Interweave Knits'...


This shawl doesn't actually have a knitted-on edging as such -- the edging at one end is worked from the cast on and leads straight into the main rectangle, and the edging at the other end is worked from a separate cast on and then grafted straight on to the opposite end of the main rectangle. While the original shawl was not knit in a mohair yarn, I have come across a really stunning version of it which was knit in Rowan 'Kidsilk Haze', which leads me to think it might work well in this yarn too.

But then again, there's also Jane Sowerby's 'Persimmon Lace' in the Summer 2006 issue of "Knitter's" magazine...


... which I think could look really interesting with the gradation of colour running up the centre panel and then in wider bands around the knitted-on edging. Just by the way -- Was any one else wondering what happened to the haze part of 'Kidsilk Haze' in the photographs of this shawl in the magazine?

Both shawls call for around 1000m of yarn, so hopefully I should have enough to enable me to make whichever one of these two shawls I decide on, with enough extra yarn to help keep the colour gradations reasonably straight when I start a new ball.

Decisions, decisions...

At the moment, I think I'm leaning more towards 'Persimmon Lace', both for its lighter look and the things I'll learn by knitting the edging around the main rectangle.