the razor shell knit lace shawl pattern
is knit from the bottom up the first rows are daunting but with the decrease
rows they just get faster and faster the Garter stitch ruffle has a beautiful
flounce to it and the vertical lines of the lace pattern burst into a fan with
the cleverly placed decreases in pattern the bamboo shines like silk and drapes
so beautifully wear it to your fanciest of holiday parties you're going to need
one ball of be so fine yarn here it is shown in colorway million dollar red
you'll also need a US six or four millimeter set of knitting needles
preferably 24 inches or longer of a circular style you'll need a yarn needle
scissors and optional is stitch markers hi I'm Kristin Omdahl today I want to
show you how to make this absolutely gorgeous knit lace shawl it's called the
razor shell and it is absolutely inspired by a seashell that I found at
the beach in this video I'm going to show you how to read the line by line
instructions how to read the chart and we're going to follow along with the
beautiful finished shawl as we go so you can see exactly what yours is supposed
to look like along the way let's get started in the beginning of the pattern
for the ruffle you want to have twice as many stitches as you are actually going
to need to begin the project and that's because doing double the number of
stitches and then decreasing after the ruffle is what gives you this volume and
that flounce so for this particular pattern in this gauge we're going to
cast on 630 stitches and I know that sounds scary but trust me it goes really
pretty quickly because you're only doing 12 rows of simple garter stitch while
you're doing those that large number of stitches then you're going to decrease
in each stitch across so that you go from 630 all the way down to 315 for the
rest of the shawl we have an 8 stitch selvage edge which means the first and
last eight stitches of each row of the shawl are
just knit and it gives you this beautiful border along the sides which
ends up being the top edge of the shawl and so after the ruffle all you're doing
besides that one little selvage edge at the beginning and end of each row is you
are working in this repeated lace pattern 13 times and if you notice the
shawl is pretty much a half circle or a shell shape so we're repeating the
pattern repeat 13 times each one of these is one of the repeats and so we
start with this widest portion of the stitch pattern here it starts with 23
stitches per repeat and as we work in the pattern we decrease up the center
spine actually we've got yarn overs and a decrease in here and we do that
repeatedly and you can follow the line by line instructions or
the chart and we'll talk about that in a minute until you get all the way up to
the top edge here and then when those repeats end they come down to one stitch
each so because we did 13 repeats you'll then have 13 stitches in between your
two 8-stitch selvedge edges and then you're going to work back and forth on
those eight stitches knitting two together on this side of the edge so
that you're eating away at those stitches and working sideways joining
perpendicularly to those stitches from the lace pattern and you may have
already understood that if you've looked at the pattern but sometimes I think it
helps people to see a visual of what you're doing and anyway so going back to
this once you go across the entire number of those stitches from those
wedges you'll then do a three needle bind off or so the first eight stitches
to the last eight stitches of the row together and then you have this seamless
beautiful shawl where you can't see where that selvage edge begins and ends
from the right and left side of the shawl and the real beauty of working a
bottom up shawl is that even though it feels like a ton of work in the
beginning when you're doing this ruffle and as you're decreasing down you
rows get progressively shorter and faster as you go which really has some
of a gratification style feeling as you're getting up towards the end so
now what I wanted to show you is how to read the chart it's very simple we have
a key we have boxes and we have numbers along the side and I'm going to show you
a close-up of this so you can see what I'm talking about first of all in the
key it gives you the definition of each of the symbols and so a blank square is
just to knit a little circle in the square is the yarn over and then we have
our dashed lines which if it's right-leaning it's a knit two together
if it's left-leaning it's a slip slip knit then we have something that looks
kind of like an M and that's our double decrease and it's called a slip two knit
one pass two slip stitches over and then our final one at the bottom here is kind
of like that M but it has a five in the middle and that's because it is a
stronger decrease it is a knit five together if you need any help with these
stitches I do have videos and glossary definitions that give you step-by-step
wording on how to do these on my website on a page called how to knit and I'll
put a link to that in the video description okay moving on to the actual
chart on this particular chart were only showing every other row the reason being
is that every even row in this entire project is just to knit across so it was
kind of redundant to show a row of just knit stitches every other row so you'll
notice that we only have numbers on the right side of the chart and that's
because we're only showing the odd numbered rows you'll notice that the
first row has four numbers next to it that's because you're going to repeat
this row for rows 1 3 5 & 7 row 9 has its own unique pattern and that's
because on row 9 of the pattern we only do that set of instructions on that row
this chart reflects everything you're
repeating for the 13 repeats inside the 8 stitch selvage edge so row one would
begin with knit 8 then the sections that you're going to repeat 13 times are what
you see on this chart it's a knit 1 yarn over knit 9 s2kp which means slip two
knit one pass slip stitch over knit 9 yarn over knit 1 now you can do this
with or without stitch markers if you're going to place stitch markers you're
going to want to place them after the first knit 8 and then after every time
you do this section sometimes I get asked questions about how you would
modify the shawl let's say you wanted it to be shorter or let's say you would
want it to be longer it's really simple to modify this shawl because on the rows
that you repeat the stitch pattern for example on rows 1 3 5 and 7 you could
have just repeat it twice instead of the four times or you could do it six times
instead of four times if you wanted to make this a shorter shawl everywhere that
it has the stitch pattern repeated for four rows you would do it for two rows
instead or three whatever and if you wanted to make this a much longer shawl
you could increase by one row in each one of those repeating sections the only
thing that I would caution you is on the row like row 9 19 29 and 39 those are
rows where you're affecting the stitch count make sure you don't repeat those
because those will really severely alter your stitch count every time you order a
hank of be so fine yarn it comes hand wound into a center pull ball and it
comes with a pod of Wrapture all natural delicate wash this is wonderful for
blocking your shawl and if you have any questions about how to block this shawl
please refer to the link in the video description where I've done several
tutorials on how to block another question that comes my way pretty often
is how often do you block and when you think of
blocking as how you launder something I think it's a little easier to understand
what you'll want to do is soak this tiny little pod in open it up place it in a
large bowl or a sink with lukewarm water you're going to soak this, squeeze the
water out lay it flat to dry pin it to the final shape if it needs it
and let it dry and that would be not only when you're blocking it but when
you're laundering it as well again I'll put those links in the video
description if you'd like to watch some videos if you'd like to watch some
videos on blocking the pattern the chart and the yarn are available on my website
and those links will also be available in the video's description below please
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