Midnight Garden

I saw this beautiful border pattern in a book of old German designs. After changing it to fit into an odd number of stitches, I pulled the motif out of the center of the diamonds and repeated it for the body of the shawl. That was the original Midnight Garden. I was never quite satisfied with the abrupt change between the border and the shawl body. Since I was re-knitting the sample anyway, I decided to fix that problem. Now the line between where the body ends and the border begins is more subtle, less distinct, and much more pleasing to my eye.

Shawl is knit from the border edge up to the top center point of the shawl, decreasing four stitches on every right-side row. The final 12 stitches are grafted together. At first the yarn is used up quite quickly, and it doesn’t seem that there will be enough, but at the top the rows go faster than the yarn does. The final rows are so short that they seem to fly by, making up for the slowness of the earlier ones.

• Yarn: Fingering weight yarn, 425 [600, 775, 975] yards.
• Model: Malabrigo Mechita; 420 yards in 100 grams in Teal Feather in second largest size; 100% superwash merino wool.
• Gauge: 17 sts and 17 rows to 4 inches in stitch pattern, blocked.
• Needles: 1. US 6 (4 mm), or size required for gauge, plus one additional needle in the same size for grafting; 2. US 8 (5 mm) needle for loose cast on (optional)
• Finished sizes: 47.5 x 23.75 [56 x 28, 64 x 32, 71.5 x 35.75] inches.
• Stitch instructions: Charted only.