In December, I was madly knitting a scarf to give to an old friend of my husband’s family at Christmas. This person took care of my husband and his four younger sisters for several years. She came over from a small village in the Black Forest to Ohio and never returned. She stayed, earned her nursing degree, worked in a teaching hospital and retired so she could have adventures all over the world such as experiencing “summer” in Antarctica.
Anyway, I felt it was time she had a hand-knitted present. She is one of those unfortunate people whose birthday is very close to Christmas. They always seem to get short-changed.
For her special shawl, I used a skein of yarn which Brooke of the Painted Tiger dyed as a gradient with distinct bands of green separated by bands of black. It is absolutely amazing how Brooke manages to dye skeins of 490 yards with sharp transitions between different colors.
If you are interested, Brooke has the most wonderful yarn/fiber club! Each month she will send you a 4 oz skein of sock yarn or 4 oz of fiber to spin. When my sister turned the big 5-0, I transferred a year’s worth of my skein-a-month club to her. My sister really loved all the variation and color which arrived in her mailbox. And I felt a little envious when she would call and tell me about the special yarn in the latest package.
Anyway, for this friend’s present, I decided to use a variation of Evelyn Clark’s original triangular swallowtail shawl.
This crescent variation was designed by Susan of the Raineysisters. Check out her original blog post here!
I sort of followed the directions (mostly) for the crescent swallowtail but did make a couple of variations when I saw the color change from green to black happening. For the first band of black, I added a few rows of faggoting lace. For the second band of black I did a purl row, twist stitch row. If you look closely at one of pictures below, you can see where the transition between green and black happened exactly at the end of a row.
For the bind-off, I used bright gold wool to give the edge a pop of color!
Our old family friend seemed to like this Christmas/Birthday present very much!
Who needs to think? 