No, I have not been recruited to nab a rare Egyptian scarab from the collection of an absent-minded English Earl; but I am indeed trying something completely new to me.
I’ve been hearing about brioche knitting for many years, even before entering the knitting industry. Most of the projects I ran across in those early encounters were in thick yarns and loud colors, and I was more interested in lace shawls anyhow; so brioche was passed over without a second look.
Since launching my business, back in ancient times (2018 to be exact), market research has become part of life. In the intervening years, new brioche designs had entered the market, with more sophisticated colors and wearable shapes; I saved a few to my Ravelry favorites and then promptly forgot about them.
But last year, during the 2019 Indie Gift-A-Long (see my project here) I caught sight of this beautiful rendition of Robynn Weldon’s Frail Scarf; and something inside said, “Learn how to make that right now!”.
I started mentally collecting brioche patterns (Psilo! Unda! Lisse!), but as is my custom I had multiple projects already in progress and was unable to start one. Also I was determined to be good and use stash yarn.
Enter The Tourist Shawl by Raina Kruus. It uses two average-sized skeins of laceweight yarn, features a fun repeating ‘swirly’ brioche pattern, and has a wearable asymmetrical shape. And tassels!
After leaving it to sit in my queue since January, I cast on this weekend. It’s awesome.
Perhaps it’s the first victorious flush of learning something new, or the fact that the rows are (for now) much shorter than they will be by the end of the shawl, but I’m not finding it to be nearly as difficult as I expected. In preparation I watched these tutorials from Knit Picks and SweetGeorgia Yarns, and the concept will probably be fairly intuitive to anyone who’s done mosaic knitting, and classic 1×1 ribbing (which is one of the first stitches we all learn). Because of the structure of brioche, only about one in every four rows of this particular shawl has any actual increases or decreases—less than your average lace pattern. After a few rows of getting in the groove, I was able to watch Tom Cruise falling out of a building in Mission: Impossible with one eye and watch my shawl with the other. However, I hear that mistakes, once made, are devilish to undo and fix; so I cannot promise that there will be no tale of woe in the near future.
The yarn is Knit Picks Shadow Lace in two discontinued colors, Oregon Coast Heather (gold) and Midnight Heather (blue). (As a side note, I’m quite sad that all the heathers in Shadow have disappeared, as it’s quite tricky to find heathered lace yarn with all the rage over hand-dyed colors.) I find the combination quite regal, but perhaps that’s hyperactive poetic enthusiasm…
The question niggling at me now is, “Are you really going to wear this?” Maybe, maybe not; only one way to find out. But for now, this is pretty satisfying.
