Help for the echo flower shawl

In the beginning of January we started the Echo Flower shawl knit-along (KAL) on Ravelry. It's been really fun but along the way we noticed that some notice shawl knitters (Eddie included) were having trouble understanding the construction of a triangular shawl.

Shawl construction
We have tried making a drawing of the construction of the Echo Flower shawl to help you visualise how the shawl is worked.


Echo flower shawl construction (copyright Historic Crafts)

• You basically begin the shawl in the middle of the long side (upper border) of the triangle (pink on the drawing) by making a garter stitch rectangle. For more on starting a triangular shawl have a look at Damp City Knits post on the Garter Tab Cast on. This leaves you with 11 stitches (3 on each side and 5 on the long edge).


• This rectangular garter stitch tab is also the beginning of the garter stitch top border (green on the drawing) which you work by knitting the 3 stitches at the start and end of each row. These are not on any of the charts but remember to work them for the whole shawl.


• The remaining 5 stitches from the long edge of the rectangle are used for the setup chart (blue). The setup chart is only worked once and includes the center stitch. Putting in a stitch marker before it help you keep track of it.


• The flower chart (purple) makes the body of the shawl. This chart needs to be worked once on each side of the center stitch. So you work border stitches - flower chart - center stitch - flower chart - border stitches. You repeat the flower chart 8 times for the shoulderette and 13 times for the shawl.


• The border charts (1-3) (yellow) are worked in the order they are numbered. The center stitch is erased and becomes part of chart 2.


• Finally the edge chart (teal) is worked once continually across the whole body of the shawl.

2 into 9 stitch
There has also been a bit of confusion about how to work the 2 into 9 and 3 into 9 stitches. We have made a little video showing how to do this. The important thing here is to keep the stitches loose.



The image and video in this post are copyright of Historic Crafts. You are hereby granted permission to use them for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit Historic Crafts and link back to this page. If you are using them and talking about this post I would love to hear from you in the comments.