I am so excited to finally share with you my Rain Falls shawl pattern! You can find it both on Ravelry and knitgraffiti.com! I am running an introductory offer: receive a 15% discount using coupon code RAIN through Sunday, April 1st at midnight CT! Place the pattern into your cart, and enter the code to receive the discount.
This shawl has quite the story. I actually never intended to publish the pattern at all! But I’m so happy that I was able to share it with you because it was such a comfort to me during a difficult time. It all goes back to last August when we found out that Hurricane Harvey was making its way to us down here in Corpus Christi, Texas. We had only recently moved here, and knew that hurricanes were pretty common. I don’t think we thought one would come so soon! My oldest son had just started Kindergarten, so things were already a bit crazy around here! After all of our preparations were made, there was the waiting. We had decided not to evacuate, since we live quite far from the bay. Our area is on the edge of town, and elevated, so we rarely get flooded. I needed a distraction, something that could keep my hands busy but also able to focus on my children and comfort them during a scary time. Like many of you I’m sure, I have baskets and bins full of beautiful leftover fingering weight yarn!! Tiny little balls of gorgeousness that I can’t bear to throw away. Well, this was the perfect project for them. I just started grabbing all of my favorites and arranging them on my sofa.
Before casting on, I actually did a little research into shawl shaping, to create a shawl in a vortex shape! The final result is closer to an asymmetrical shawl knit on the bias, but the shaping used is a bit different than a traditional shawl shaped this way. I didn’t end up using all of this yarn. I didn’t want it to look like a rainbow, more like how the sky looks when a storm is on the way. Fading from pinks to dark gray, with some blue and purple in the middle.
Originally, it was going to be all two-color brioche!! But as I kept knitting it, I felt myself wanting to change stitch patterns as well as colors. So I made this a texture AND color play shawl! It starts with two-color brioche, then moves to two-color garter stitch, then a small section of two-color seed stitch, and finally ending with a heavy marled garter stitch border. Even after the hurricane was gone and we had moved on, I continued to pick up this shawl when I needed a brain break. Getting a little bit done here and there, it eventually was finished!! I have written the pattern exactly as I knit my own sample, but with the color blending completely up to you. Included in the pattern is the simple formula that I used to blend my own colors, as well as a graphic schematic that you can color on and play with ideas. I truly hope this can be a fun pattern for you! Let your imagination go wild, grab your leftover yarns! Or even just two colors! One of my test knitters used just two colors for the entire shawl, and it really made the textures of the different stitch patterns shine. If you’d like to see all of the different yarns and colors that I used in my shawl, be sure to visit my own project page on Ravelry, here.
Thank you for following along, and I hope you enjoy my newest pattern! xx Lesley.
