This shawl was designed for the 2018 Miss Babs Knitting Tour

Please Note: This shawl uses almost the entire skein. To make sure you can knit the shawl out of one skein please be sure to get gauge after blocking and/or use one needle size smaller than you normally would!

When Miss Babs asked me to design a shawl inspired by my home town of Edinburgh, the first thing I did was exchange my bike for a camera on my commute through the city centre, slowing down to notice details I usually speed past. When I went through the photos I’d taken I began sketching, looking for simple abstract shapes. Over and over I was drawing sweeping arches coming together above intricately detailed windows. I started swatching, attempting to combine cables, lace and ribbing into a combination that would echo those shapes in an intuitive, knitterly way. I wasn’t sure how to end it, until I came across a photo of the Thistle Chapel inside St. Giles Cathedral. The elaborate stone ceiling features columns that spread out into separate ribs — on the ceiling they’re decorated with clusters of carved leaves, but I ended mine with a picot bind off, arranged so the picots are perfectly aligned with the ribs.
The crescent shaped shawl is easy to wear, shaped with increases worked at the beginning and end of every row and edged with a simple but neat ribbed selvedge. Additional increases are worked at the beginning to build in shoulder shaping and avoid the humped edge common on crescent shawls. This means the shawl doesn’t lie flat without puckering, but sits comfortably around the shoulders when worn.