I thought I’d be making socks for the relatives I’m seeing in a few months but… I’ve become fascinated by shawls.

I wanted a variegated or striped yarn in red colours but I couldn’t find anything locally so I fell back on the trusty Morris and Sons Empire yarn (100% Australian superfine merino). I chose the 2ply because I hadn’t tried it before but I wasn’t sure if it would work because it’s incredibly thin with 700m in a 50 gram ball.

After playing with the yarn I contemplated knitting sections with the vivid red colour and then swapping in a strand of another red, but in the end I knew that the recipient loves bright red scarves so I kept it one colour. I doubled up the yarn so I should have just bought the 4ply version :) But you knit and you learn.

The free Nurmilintu shawl pattern by Heidi Alander is a nice pattern and a great use of one ball of yarn. I messed up the lace a few times so lifelines can be helpful, or just not multi-tasking when working on the lace sections.

I was slightly confused at part 4 wondering if “repeat part 2” referred to the second segment of the lace pattern but after staring at the photos and doing some maths I realised it referred to part 2 of the pattern (i.e. you do the whole of the lace chart).

I ran out of yarn with 4 rows of the final lace section to go but, as with any knitting project, unless someone knows the pattern they won’t have a clue that it’s missing a few rows :)

My Ravelry project page has a few more notes about this knit.