Wisteria Basket Shawl

I am delighted to present my second lace shawl, knit for my maternal Gran, a fellow knitter!

Gran has always loved nature, flowers and plants in particular. She worked for a time as a volunteer in Kings Park giving tours and educating people on the native flora abundant in the gardens.

So it was an easy choice of shawl for her - the Flower Basket Shawl of course!

The colour choice was also easy, after a little consultation with my lovely Mama =) Gran and Grandad have had, for as long as I can remember, a fantastically huge wisteria vine growing in abundance over their back patio. Masses of blue and purple flowers would fill the sky, wafting down to the paving to land like snow adrift on the floor. This has always been one of my favourite memories of Gran and Grandad's house, and the colours are Gran's favourite too! Perfect!

I purchased the skein of 'Seabreeze' laceweight (2 ply) merino from Daphne at The Knittery some time ago, and started the shawl this Januray, holding the yarn doubled (from inside and outside of the yarn cake) so as to work as a fingering weight (4 ply). This also helped in the colour pooling stakes - I didn't want the splashes of colour to detract form the lace patterning, so holding the two strands together was perfect as mostlmy one strand was at a different shade than the other giving a nice mottled affect. I chose 5.5mm needles as I wanted very open lace work.

I'm very glad I added an extra repeat of the flower baskets - it would have been tiny without that! I also added in a garter stitch row (i.e knit the purl row) before binding off, in an attempt to stop any curling- I can't remember where I read this hot tip, but 'thank-you!' to whichever blogger it was! :)

I'm VERY happy with how it's turned out and can hardly wait to gift it to my Gran =) As far as I konw she's unaware I've been knitting it for her, so it should be an awesome surprise! It was Gran who first taught me toknit back when I was about 8 or so, having a weekend sleep over with one of my cousins at Gran and Grandad's. Gran had a little kit for us both of needles and a few colours of wool, we burned through the wool provided so then Gran plucked out some colours from her stash for us to continue with. We had to ask Gran to change colours for us when we wanted to get a new colour going, but we knit on and on and on with our little scarves that weekend! I still have mine somewhere, a little bit holey and with some intersting bumps on the side where I got a little creative with increasing and decreasing! I didn't keep on with the knitting as that stage, but have very fond memories of my first initiation into the knittiverse and Gran's part in that :)