The Icarus Shawl

I wish, I wish, I wish that I could take a decent photograph of this shawl.

Alas, it is not to be.

Pattern: Icarus Shawl, by Mirian Felton, published in Interweave Knits, Summer 06.
Materials: Claudia’s Handpainted Yarns, Silk Lace, color “Woodland Moss.”
Needles: Size 3 circular
Cast on: May 26, 2007
Finished: June 26, 2007

I can’t say enough about the yarn. The colorway is beautiful. I had the skein (all 1,100 yards of it!) wound into a center-pull ball, and it looked like spun gold. The silk is soft, lustrous and smooth, everything that silk should be. I took it home to pet it for about a week before I did anything else.

Being silk, it blocks ridiculously well. I blocked my swatch and then put it through my usual test: dropped it in the bottom of my knitting bag and left it to rattle around for a month. I forgot it was there, pulled it out one day, and it looked like I had just knit and blocked it that morning. I pinned and spritzed both the swatch and the finished shawl to block.

Do you know how strong silk is? It is one of the strongest natural fibers. Spider silk has a tensile strength comparable to steel. A few weeks ago, I visited someone’s house while wearing this shawl. He had a little dog. The dog jumped up on me, and his dewclaw caught the edge of my shawl. The poor dog! He yelped and cried and couldn’t get free no matter how much he struggled. We finally got him detached and then everyone looked at the shawl, very panicked. We couldn’t even find where he got caught. The shawl is fine. The dog was quite unhappy. (He recovered quite quickly and 10 minutes later was running around like nothing had ever happened.)

The pattern is straightforward; most of it is stockinette. The only trouble I had was when the weather was warm and my hands began to sweat, because the yarn clung to my fingers instead of sliding through as it should.

This colorway is lovely. Greens and golds and browns, just the thing to go with red hair. As I already said, I can’t get it to photograph well. I did use a cropped photo, in sepia, for the header of this blog. Here’s another photo a friend took while we were shopping one day:

Why yes, that is a knitting needle you see in my hair! It’s a size 8 Clover bamboo DPN. If you would like to view a tutorial on this hairstyle, please visit this page of my blog.