For the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to
design crochet patterns for Cascade Yarns, and today I am writing to share how
I created one of the most recently released patterns – the Bloomfield shawl.
Most of the time, my inspiration starts from the yarn.
Heritage Wave is a super fine weight yarn, and the lightness of the yarn just
begged to be made into a shawl. After deciding what I would be creating with
the yarn, the next step was the shape, and I knew I wanted to challenge myself
to try a new shape.
A close friend of mine, who is also a knit and crochet
designer, had recently designed a half circle crochet shawl for another yarn
company. After asking for some tips on how to create that shape in crochet, I
knew that sometime soon I wanted to try designing a half circle shawl in
crochet myself. A couple of months later, I received a skein of Heritage Wave
yarn to swatch with for design proposals, and I knew this would be a good yarn
to use to try designing a new shawl in a new shape.
So, I have the yarn, the idea of what to make with the
yarn, and what shape it will be. The next step is choosing the right hook size.
Normally with this weight of yarn, you would choose to work with a smaller hook
size, like an F/3.75mm, but since I was looking for a lacier look, I also
swatched with a few more sizes. After making swatches with the 3.75mm, as well
as a 7/4.50mm and H/5.00mm hooks, I liked the lightness that the H hook created
best, so that was the hook size I would use for this design.
In starting the half circle shape, I decided to use the
method I learned for hat rounds increases and adapt it for this use. One of the
points I like best about using this method is that the round/row numbers
correspond with the number of stitches in each set. For example, Row 3 had a
stitch repeat of three – 2 double crochet stitches in the first stitch and 1
double crochet in the next stitch. Using this method is a great memory trick to
keep your stitch counts on track; if I’m doing Row 4, there are 4 stitches in
the repeat. Since I started Row 1 with 9 double crochets and the starting
section was going to only be 5 rows, my final row of the starting section would
have 45 stitches. This information is important, because it determines what
stitch patterns you can use.
I knew I needed to alternate the solid stitched sections
of the shawl, where all the increase stitches would be created, with a lacy
stitch pattern. My stitch pattern had to fit two requirements – I wanted it to
open up as much as possible when it was blocked out, and it needed to have a
pattern repeat of 5 stitches, based on my Row 5 ending stitch count. It was
time to turn to multiple stitch dictionaries, find lacy stitch patterns that
have a 5-stitch pattern repeat, and swatch. After much trial and error, I was
down to a choice of two stitch patterns, which you see above. These two stitch
patterns meet the pattern repeat requirement, and they can both be described as
lace, but how much will they open up?
An easy way to check if you will get the effect you want
is spread the stitching out, in order to simulate how the stitch pattern will
look after it has been blocked. I pinned out the swatch and discovered the
bottom stitch pattern opened up much more than the top pattern. Since I wanted
that look of openness to offset the solid stitched sections of the shawl, the
bottom stitch pattern was the better choice for the design I was creating.
And this was how the shawl was created –
deciding the shawl shape, finding the hook size that creates the effect you
want with the yarn you are using, and making multiple swatches to discover the
best stitch patterns to compliment the overall design. I’m very pleased with
how this shawl came out, and I look forward to creating more designs with this
shape in the future. Thanks for taking time to discover how this design was
created, and thank you to Cascade Yarns
