What I Made: Autumn Flowers Shawl

I made this a couple of years ago, when I bought some cream fingering weight yarn and some beautiful Debbie Bliss Party Angel in brown with gold flecks, and I spent quite some time deciding what to do with them. I found the Creeping Daisy Shawl pattern on Ravelry, and was struck immediately by how lovely it looked.

I started off in cream but pretty quickly decided that the fingering weight yarn was too light, even though that's what others had used to make the shawl, so I dragged my husband to the yarn store again and got some green Wendy merino DK.

The first part of the shawl was deceptively easy, and while it took me a couple of evenings to complete, I'm sure if I'd concentrated I could have done it quicker. I then blocked that part because the edges were curling over.

flowers detail

The flowers were more difficult, however. I think this was partly because it used a stitch I wasn't used to, but also because the  Party Angel yarn is hard to work with- it's really hard to unravel mistakes and, in the colour I used, even see the stitches. I did them over two evenings and most of the weekend. They were extremely pretty when done though.

edging detail

The love/Solomon knot edge looked as though it was going to be really quick and easy, and was reasonably fast until my inner perfectionist collided with the puff stitches. I had to do the first few over and over again until I got the right number of loops to make the puffs look puffy. I got much faster as I went a long. The daisy chain that weaves through it was easy and fast, and I decided to mix it up a bit with different sizes of flowers.

This is a lovely shawl, and I've continued to wear it on and off for a couple of years now. I've had a lot of compliments on it! I'd like to make another at some point, though possibly using an easier to handle yarn for the flowers. It took a little longer than I thought it would, but by comparison to the other patterns I've tried it's pretty fast.

Should I make one too?  Yes, especially if you want to give someone a unique and eye-catching gift, something a little different from the average handmade shawl.