Back in 2018, one of my yarn buys was the Unplanned Peacock morphic colorway “Strawberry Fields”. It’s been hanging on my bedroom wall ever since, until it was bumped from the wall in my enthusiasm to hang up my needlefelt sunset. It’s the last if the Unplanned Peacock I bought that summer to be used.
Now, I know I was speaking only a few posts back about two new shawls I had on my list to knit… but once these fun pinks, purples, and oranges were off the wall in their little mini skeins I changed my mind. I was going to finally knit these up. When I first purchased them in 2018, I planned to make the Darwin Shawl by VeryBusyMonkey. But on reflection, while I still love the shawl pattern, I wasn’t satisfied that this morphic set was right for it. To start with, I had more yarn than the shawl called for. And I hated to not use up as much as I could.
Furthermore, I also realized I didn’t really want to do a straight start-to-end color change with the set. If I was going to progress straight through all the colors as a fade, it seemed to work best if I did the pink, the orange (there’s some orange in the pink and vice versa), the mixed, then the two purples as shown in the upper left below.
But I really loved the progression of pink – multi – orange. Yet the purple won’t fade well on either side of that. What to do?
I decided to split it into two – the purples, and the orange-multi-pink – as see on the right in the image above. Now I just needed a pattern for it. I decided to look through patterns I already owned first before looking for new pattern purchases. Afterall, I did just buy two new shawl patterns which I had decided not to make yet.
I found one in my Color issue of Ply – Stephen West’s “Clawed”. I can use the “claws” of the pattern with my three color fade, and the purple as the background. Then I can use up every last bit in the border, making it a bit bigger if needed.
It’s been a fun easy knit so far. Which I think is sort of what I needed after all the calculating that went into the Arequita top I recently finished.
What’s on your needles? Is it something simple or more complex right now?