I recently had the opportunity to attend a financial seminar in Texas. As I was preparing for the trip, I wasn’t thinking about the great information I would learn at the seminar. Nope. I was worried about what I would knit during the lectures and panel discussions! And, of course, none of the projects already on my needles (at least 5 of them… probably more, but who’s counting?) fit the bill. It had to be small and portable, fairly easy, but not so mindless that I might fall asleep, and it had to be something that we had in the store now, because I didn’t have time to go through my stash to find the right thing.

The answer was Dot by Casapinka. I gathered the staff on hand, and they helped me pick colors. I knew that I wanted a neutral background and a pop of color for the dots. We tried several combinations, but we finally settled on Anzula Squishy in ‘Hippo’ for the background and Mrs Crosby Satchel in Toucan for the dots.

Here is the shawl in progress:

The dots are done in an interesting manner. You do the first 8 stitches in the main color (MC) yarn, then you attach the contrasting color (CC) and create your dot using an i-cord type technique, then you knit two stitches with the MC, do another dot, and so on. I suppose this could be a stranded knitting technique since you’re using two colors across the row, but I found it difficult to carry the yarns at the same time (normally for stranded knitting I hold one color in my left hand and one in my right). It seemed much more easy just to drop the non-working yarn and pick up the working yarn as necessary.

Unfortunately, there was not a good way to carry the CC yarn up the edge of the work, so it was necessary to break the yarn after working a dot row and reattach it the next time I needed to do a dot row. Trapping the ends as I worked was a great idea – just wish I had done it at the beginning, instead of trying it after the 5th dot row! Sewing in the ends of the CC yarn had to be done along the dots on the back of the fabric:

Here’s a view of the back showing two rows – the one at the top is with the sewn in ends, the one in the middle is with the yarn trapped as I knit (just at the right end of the photo). Although the sewn in ends look a bit less bulky than the trapped ends, I think the trapped ends are much less likely to come out.

For this shawl, my blocking wires came in very handy. I thought I could get away with just using them on the curved edge, but because of the shape of the shawl, I also had to use it along what were the outer edges when knitting. (Slight gripe alert: I am not enamored of this shawl’s shape. The ‘straight edge’ is not straight but comes to a point at the tab beginning, creating extra fabric that is awkward. This is shown well in the photo below.Luckily, when worn, the extra fabric can be folded over so it won’t be noticeable.)

The final product is lovely and the dots look fabulous!

Here are some other color combinations that I think would be fun in the Dot shawl:

Now onto to the next project…

~ Laura