Hug me Now Shawl

I was looking for a summer shawl, to cover my shoulders for those heavily air-conditioned places. As a rule of thumb I usually knit shawls with a “looser” gauge than suggested. A looser fabric also drapes better and you get the most out of the yarn’s yardage. 

The sample I knit is in a gauge that I am comfortable with. I think it’s more important that you create a fabric that you are comfortable with rather than trying to match my exact gauge.

This shawl is knit in two stages, section one is a top down triangular shawl with 4 sts. increase every other row. The center “spine” is 3 sts. knit in the back leg, this gives a little bit of texture and lays nicer (Knitters choice). The increases are at the beginning of the row, at either side of the center spine and at the end of the row. This is the right side, wrong side is knit all the stitches. Section 2 has 6 wedges. 

I've been wearing this shawl very happily and I named it the Hug me Now shawl because it does feel like a big hug when I put it on. The yarn I used made a very light weight and very soft fabric. It's been my go to shawl all summer. When I see knitting friends I'm always asked what pattern I used. Not pattern I just made it up, knit what the yarn dictated. 

But I want to make one too they say, ok I wrote the pattern. This turned out to be a big job for me. First of all I have to reverse engineer it, then write down every single step. No “that goes without saying” everything has to be written down. Often I am a bit insecure with my writing because English is not my mother language and my grammar is ….. well could use some improvement. I have trouble with the commas and the running sentences….. oh well…. Sometimes dear friends will help out! Thank you Ellen Bloom!

Happy Knitting

I miss my blog

I started this blog August 4th 2005! And have more or less kept it going for years. Periodically I have taken a hiatus because of different reasons. Sometimes I just got tired of creating content out of laziness but I always miss it.  I blog about my knitting which is why I started this blog to begin with.

I am a "recipe" knitter and I needed to keep a record of the details for the project I was working on. Writing notes in different scraps of paper or even having notebooks etc. was not efficient. I needed pictures details and most of all a searchable data base. A knitting blog seems to be the perfect solution, I could post pictures stories and details of the projects and when I needed to remember how I did something I could look it up. With the very handy search option "search this blog" on the upper left margin.

You might wonder what I mean by "recipe" knitter. I call it recipe because to me it's sort of like cooking. There is a basic recipe for say an omelette and there can be variations of ingredients within the parameters of an omelette. To me it's sort of the same, say a basic sweater, the shape is the same but the details of the stitch patterns can be varied.

I grew up in Budapest and when I learned to knit as a small child we did not have patterns published or magazines so it was just like family recipes we shared for cooking. We also had family recipes for knitting, a sock recipe, a sweater recipe, a hat recipe etc. If you wanted to get creative and make yours look different you could add in your own stitch that maybe somebody showed you or even as a playful kid make some of them up.

When my mother died and I was going through her house and belongings I found these gloves she had saved. Carefully put in a plastic bag in a special spot where she had her little momentos saved. I remember knitting it, at the time the choice of yarn was very limited, the war was over but we still did not have luxury items like that available to us. After all we were behind the "Iron Curtain" and living under Communism and standing in long lines for everything was our daily life. 

When I was given this angora mix in yellow, yellow it was. It was part of a set I knit I was about 11 or 12 years old. I made a scarf and a hat and gloves to match. Only found the gloves the hat and scarf were long lost. 

Notice the fingers are a bit short, I guess my hand was smaller then.

BTW, I have the gloves saved too, in that very special spot where I keep my momentos. I wonder if my son will ever realize what this meant to his grandmother and I, sweet memories. I miss my mama.