Hush, Hush...

Project Details:

Koigu "Charlotte's Web Shawl"
Koigu Painter's Palette Premium Merino in P426, P417, P428, P405 and P217
Addi 5.0mm circular needle
Tulip 3.5mm bamboo crochet hook

This isn't a recent project, and is probably due for a re-blocking, but I thought I'd write about it here now as I've always been quite pleased with the way it turned out.


"Charlotte's Web" was quite a leap of faith for me, as Koigu PPPM isn't available here in Australia. I chose not to order one of the kits that were commonly available at the time, but instead ordered a selection of Koigu PPPM colourways from the Needles & Pins website in Canada, and crossed my fingers that I'd be able to put together the look I wanted from them when they finally arrived here, all the while contemplating the insanity of thinking I could choose colourways of a handpainted yarn this way and expect them to work together at all. Happily, the gamble paid off, as amongst my small selection were five which co-ordinated well. :)

I actually knit this shawl three times before I was finally happy with the ordering of the five colourways -- one of the lessons I learnt from knitting this project was that the ordering which looks best when the hanks of yarn are laid out on the table may not be the one which will look best in the finished shawl. I also graded the colourways through the fringe around the edge of the shawl in a similar order to the one used to knit the shawl itself.

For some reason, Amanda refers to this shawl as my 'hippy shawl'. ;)

And here is a close-up photo of the corner of my shawl...


... which I've included here as it really annoyed me that none of the multitude of photographs of "Charlotte's Web Shawls" I came across on the internet when I was trying to finish mine showed what people had done with the crochet edging at the corners of their shawls. The pattern was also somewhat vague on this point.

On mine, I played around with the chain length on the beginning and ending corners of the final edging row, and finally settled on 11 chain stitches as the length which gave me the best result. I also bypassed the problem a lot of people had with the cast off by omitting that step altogether and instead working the first row of the crochet edging directly into the live stitches of the final row of the shawl, which resulted in a neat edge which was relatively easy to stretch to size when the shawl was being blocked.