Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Wedding Shrug

Last weekend my brother married the woman of his dreams. It was a beautiful day filled with many fond memories.

On the knitting front, I wanted to make a little shrug to go with the sleeveless dress that I'd picked out for the occasion. I had some kid silk haze in my stash that just so happened to be the perfect colour.

wedding shrug

After seeing the lovely dream in colour shrug that Stacey had made I decided I wanted to do something similiar - just in this lighter weight yarn. I saw that the dream in colour shrug was a simple rectangle shape, and figured it would be fairly easy to replicate -- just needed to find a lace pattern that I liked and figure out the number of stitches to cast on.

wedding shrug

After some fiddling with needle size and gauge etc I cast on 80 stitches using a US2 needle and knit in rib for about 10 rows. I then followed the lace pattern from 'Waving Lace Socks' by Evelyn A Clark from the Interweave Favourite Socks book. I worked using the US 2 needle for 1 pattern repeat and then upped my needle size to US4 so that the back would have a little extra width than the sleeves. Worked a bunch more repeats in the 4, before switching back to the 2 for the last set of repeat and 10 rib rows. At the end I simply sewed the sleeves together (If I were smarter I should have just knit the beginning and end rows in the round to save the seaming). And that was it. Simple.

wedding shrug

I really like how it turned out, although truth be told I opted not to wear it on the day. Instead I found a sparkly scarf that was perfect and a bit more razzly dazzly than my knitted shrug. In hindsight I wished I'd added some seed beads to the shrug... I think that would have been the cherry on the cake. But, as they say, hindsight is 20/20!

naomi and i

And of course Naomi had her whirligig on. Aside from the bride, I think she might have been the most oohed and aahed over! ha ha ;o)

naomi's shrug