Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Lintilla shawl tip hack


About a year ago I knitted Lintilla in laceweight yarn. I'm not generally a fan of asymmetrical shawls, but the asymmetry of this one is fairly subtle and I fell in love with the ruffles pretty much at first sight, so I literally grabbed the first skein of yarn I saw in my stash and cast on with the first set of needles that looked about right.

The pattern is well-written and the ruffle construction is pretty easy to do from memory after two or three repeats and knitting the thing was a breeze. I was a very happy camper until I got to the tip, which I really don't like the look of as written. Unlike the first tip, the final one is an oddly blunt shape and doesn't even continue the line of the long side, but veers off at an ungraceful angle. The most positive thing I can say about it is that it's way too much asymmetry for my liking. :)

So I frogged it and started experimenting to see whether I could come up with a closer match for the shape of the starting tip. It took me three tries, but I eventually produced something that's close enough for jazz.
  
The starting tip is on the left and my hack is on the right. It's a little longer than the first tip, but it almost seamlessly continues the line of the shawl's long side. 

Right at the place where I diverge from the written instructions, there's a little blip where an edge stitch got over-stretched, perhaps because of the thinness of the yarn, but I can live with that and in any case it doesn't really show when the shawl is worn:



Today someone messaged me on Ravelry to ask how I did this, so I'm posting it here in case it's of interest to others as well. It's actually very straightforward:

In your final ruffle, work straight part until all body stitches have been worked, then continue as follows:
Row 1: p1, kfb, k to last 2 sts, k2tog
Row 2: p2tog, k to end

Repeat  Rows 1 and 2 until 3 sts rem, k3tog. Done!

Enjoy. :)