The Day flower shawl

This shawl I have called the Day flower shawl, as the motif in the centre of the shawl is of a small Chinese herb called the Day flower (Commelina communis in Latin). This herb has some lovely small blue flowers (see picture). I really love this pattern, and it is one of my favourites.

 

 I found this pattern in Barara G. Walker's book series ”A treasury of knitting patterns”. The pattern is called ”Dayflower”. The pattern in the inner boarder is called ”English lace”, and I found it in the same book. I composed the pattern in the outer border myself, based on a small flower motif I found in Siiri Reimann's book "The Haapsalu Shawl".

 

The centre and the inner boarder is knitted in two equal parts, and sewn together in the back of the shawl.  After the two halfs are sewn together, the outer border is knitted on. This makes the shawl symmetrical. For this shawl I used a beautiful mohair yarn, which I found on my trip to London last fall. The yarn is soft and elastic, and it fills in the pattern. This is important to make the Day flower pattern look good.

This shawl is relatively difficult to knit. Even after knitting a considerable number of lace shawls, I still had to concentrate when making this shawl. The reason was because the number stitches changed across the rows of this patter, making it difficult to remember and hard to block out afterwards, as some rows had considerably fewer stitches than others. It is however this change in the number of stitches that makes the beautiful arches in the stem of the flower. Thus, even if it is a bit hard to make, it is absolutely worth wile the effort.

Also the English lace is a bit of a challenge to knit, as the pattern is also knitted on the purl side. These are not the patterns you chose the first time you knit lace shawls, but if you are experienced and want a challenge, they are worth all the effort.