How Do You Do That? Designing a Seance Shawl, or Placing Lace in Charts

For the last few days, New York has been suffering the cruelty of August in early July. Temperatures have reached 100+ degrees. What's a knitter to do? Stay inside, of course, and knit. That's fine with me; I'm working on the third installment of The Adventures of Miss Flitt.

I've wanted to design a seance shawl since the very start of this project, but I knew the moment in the story wouldn't come until later. No story about the 19th c. is complete without a seance. But what exactly is a seance shawl? you ask. I'll tell you: It's a lace triangle shawl, and it's diaphanous, other worldly--the ether practically clings to it-- and it wards off the chill that the spirits bring when roused. I've spent two days now laboring over the puzzle of the triangle shawl; maybe it's the heat that kept me from grasping its simplicity, but I argued with tangled yarn, Barbara Walker, and begged the ghosts of knitters past for their help, but alas, my questions were met with silence . . . .

It must be the heat, because I knitted the lovely Trinity Shawlette by Anniken Allis in a record amount of knitting time.

If you're not familiar with that pattern, it's clearly written and nearly free. The designer only asks that you donate money to Doctors without Borders.

We come now, to the moment of clarity that is allowing me to design my Seance Shawl.

Here are a few charts I've made:

To demonstrate, I've placed a very simple lace stitch--Barbara Walker's Cat's Paw from the first Treasury--into two triangles.

Chart 1 shows each side of the triangle shawl with the side sts or increases on either side and two central increases. These are all the stitches for the start of the shawl. You can continue indefinitely.

Chart 2 shows what your shawl will more closely resemble. I turned the two triangles and outer borders at 45 degree angles.


Chart 3 shows the only change I've made to the lace pattern. In the hi-lighted pink square, I've turned the sl1-k2tog-psso into an sl1-k1-psso. Remember that within the triangles, you should only decrease as many times as you increase.


You can insert any lace pattern into the triangle that you like. It' so much easier than my brain was allowing for! I was thinking in squares, but again those numbers, that math: I should of course have been imagining a triangle as two separate triangles, and so and so forth.

Here's the key:

Have fun, and if you notice any errors of have suggestions, please write.