It’s time to talk about knitting again!

I finished my Earth Stripe Shawl and immediately started on another famous knit – Charlotte’s Web. This is a design from Koigu that requires 5 skeins of their KPPPM. (Koigu Painters Palette Premium Merino). You change colours gradually as you knit the shawl, so there’s a gradation thing going on. The original pattern shows a heavy fringe, but I don’t like fringes. I decided to just use up all five skeins and make the shawl bigger.

I bought a bundle of ten skeins in shades of purple at the Koigu tent sale last summer (with a pattern book) and had a lot of fun this fall switching them around in various combinations. (These ten-skein Paint Packs are illustrated on the KPPPM page. Scroll down to see them all. Mine is the Royal Purple – you’ll be able to see why I had a hard time choosing one!) The first three in my shawl were the ones at the top left that obviously went together to me. The others, hmm, required some consideration.

Here’s the shawl so far. This is about 2.5 skeins in, a little less because I kept a good chunk of the first skein to knit a contrast hem at the end.

The two caked up skeins at the bottom right will be my next two colours, then I’ll do a hem of some kind in the first colour. I’m using the two of the skeins at the top right of the first picture – the middle one in that picture is #4 and the inky one below it will be #5. The other five skeins are for another shawl, in the order of the second photo. Maybe I’ll start with the pinky one at the right and just make another Charlotte’s Web. We’ll see.

This shawl is a really lovely knit. The lace repeat is easy to memorize, so it’s my tv knit. There are a lot of comments on Ravelry about the instructions being confusing, but I haven’t found that – maybe because I just used the chart for the lace. Since taking this picture, I’ve almost finished with the fourth colour. This one is really going to bloom when it’s blocked!

What do you think?