Secret Garden Shawl

Quite a while back I found a beautiful shawl with the name Secret Garden on Alana Dakos' beautiful blog Never Not Knitting. I loved it right from the start, but it took a while until I bought the pattern. When my students at the German School gave me a gift certificate for my favorite yarn store I finally got three skeins of Tosh Merino Light (the recommended yarn in the pattern), a scrumptious hand dyed yarn in fingering weight. I chose the color "tart" which is a rich darker shade of red.

The pattern looked complicated and of course, at the beginning I didn't "get" it, but finally I had a humble beginning.

Despite making a lot of mistakes and redoing entire rows I kept on knitting and after a week it had grown considerably.

Every row in this pattern is different, and every row consists of sections - a section that is repeated several times along the row. After having done several mistakes I got into the habit of counting the stitches in each section, so I marked the beginning of a section with a piece of short yarn. When I was done with a section I simply moved the yarn forward so that I didn't lose count.

As you can see the pattern consists of a lot of cables. I first worked with a bamboo cable needle, but I didn't like it that much. Then I saw a YouTube video where a knitter used a different kind of cable needle that looked like a big hook. One of the craft/fabric stores in town had it and with this the cables were much easier and faster to knit up.

However, this still wasn't my last improvement. After a while I found moving the yarn forward and counting the stitches in each section tiresome. I decided to use small ring markers for each section that would stay there permanently. Now suddenly things really moved along since I didn't have to count the stitches in each section anymore!

Halfway done...

And then disaster struck! About a little more than three quarters along the row my needles broke. Suddenly I had a very short piece of the circle needle in my left hand and the rest in my right one with several stitches dropping off the needle. Holy cow!!! I was close to tears and couldn't move for a few minutes. However, I knew that somehow I had to get the stitches on whatever needle as fast as possible before they messed up the entire pattern. These were very intense moments and it's a wonder that I didn't yell at my poor husband who asked whether he could help me somehow. I just tried to focus and get those stitches back on a needle!

No, I don't have a photo of the disaster - are you kidding me?

The following day I got a new needle and settled back into knitting, one section and one row at a time. The shawl grew and grew...

... until the day before we flew out to Hawai'i it was done. Finished!

I felt wonderful when I had weaved in the last one of the threads. And a little proud as well.

It was quite difficult to get a photo of the entire shawl in all its glory.

There was the option of making a button hole, albeit in a very odd position. It took me two months to buy a button for it and sew it on!