July is not, I'm afraid, Travel-Month for us -- but I can see, as Elizabeth makes a point of telling us in this month's Knitter's Almanac chapter, that shawls make good travel knitting. "First of all, fine wool takes up little space, but affords plenty of actual knitting. Secondly, a circular needle can hardly get lost unless you pull it out by main force and cast if from you." You can even store the current ball of yarn in the little "bag" made by the growing shawl on a circular needle!
The Pi Shawl is possibly Elizabeth Zimmermann's most well-known design -- a quick internet search yields 47,500 hits, from projects on individual knitting blogs to knitalongs to kits from dozens of vendors. Based, of course, on the geometric relationship of the circumference of a circle to its radius, the Pi Shawl is one of those things that seems so obvious that you wonder why no-one had ever done it before. The circumference of a circle doubles as its radius doubles -- thus, doubling both the number of stitches and the number of rows between increase rounds will get you a shawl that shapes itself neatly and efficiently into an ever-larger circle. Brilliant, and brilliantly simple.
"Need it be said that the first and most important step is to choose the best material available?"
Mine is Koigu KPPPM in shade P305, a rather sedate (for Koigu) blend of lavendars, purples, and greys. It was a coincidence that it matches this month's Project Spectrum palette, but a happy one, to be sure! I ordered it late last summer, when I first thought of doing the Almanac -- it's the month I've most looked forward to, in fact. I like both of Elizabeth's versions, but although the one in the top picture is pretty (for those, like me, to whom it would matter, there is a slightly different version in Knitter's Magazine Shawls and Scarves, in which the diamond and petal patterns are straightened out to align symmetrically), I thought that the concentric-circles would be more interesting with this Koigu colorway.
One of the nice things about working from the center outwards is that in gratifyingly short order, you've really gotten somewhere!
The shawl is going to be lovely, the yarn is beautiful! I've been thinking of knitting a prayer shawl for my friend with breast cancer - this just might be the one.
I really am still working on that PBSJ as well - really...and some day I actually plan on finishing.
Posted by: Beth | July 11, 2006 at 05:42 PM
simply gorgeous. cheers!!
Posted by: kelli ann | July 14, 2006 at 11:16 AM