You know those annoying film franchises where the producers didn’t know when to stop? Like when a single book turns into a trilogy, or a trilogy turns into a quartet, or every character gets a spin-off movie or tv series until all the plot holes are disguised by a thousand hours of backstory?
Apparently I can’t judge anymore. Because A Shawl Story now officially has a sequel.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. (Just like there weren’t supposed to be any more Star Wars movies after The Rise of Skywalker…) Those of you who remember A Shawl Story and A Shawl Story: Epilogue will recall that making the same thing twice is usually an anomaly for me. But when an old family friend reached out to me and asked me to make 3 shawls for his son’s wedding (to be worn by the bride and the two mothers), what was I supposed to say? I’m a big fan of weddings, and an even bigger fan of friends. In my defense, I made one condition—no Kodamas. That would just be too much. So I guess I can still give LucasFilm the side-eye—at least I didn’t just do another Death Star.
But I digress.
This friend approached me more than a year out from the wedding with two requests: the 3 shawls needed to match (he chose Miramis by Nim Teasdale (Ravelry link), a pattern that I’ve knit before), and they needed to be a very specific shade of mauve-ish pink. Between crazy covid shipping and me getting the shade of pink wrong several times, I ended up with about 4 months to do the actual knitting. As a result, my documentation of the process was pretty atrocious on the whole. I didn’t get photos of the yarn or the works-in-progress; nor did I get blocking photos. Squeezing the knitting in between piles of sample knitting and pattern writing meant that I started and finished the 3rd shawl in about a week. But they’re done; and I got photos of all 3 together, just to prove that I did it.
If you’re going to knit a pattern 3 times in 4 months, this is a good one. It’s pretty, interesting, and easy to memorize.
The perfect shade of pink ended up being Madelinetosh’s Pink Mist Smoke Tree colorway on their Prairie base, which was discontinued mere weeks after our order was placed.
It’s hard to see in the photos, but each of those diamonds in the lace border and each of the points has a couple of pink glass beads in the center:
The wedding was this past weekend; the father of the groom surprised the his wife, the bride, and her mother with the shawls. I gather that everyone is pleased.
That was all very exciting, as you can imagine. I doubt I’ll be doing any such thing again anytime soon; my circle of friends seems to be fresh out of weddings for the time being. But if Paramount can make a Top Gun sequel after all these years, anything is possible…
