Wedding ring shawl

In Wednesday's post I mentioned the item I was most proud to have made was a wedding ring shawl.

Back in the middle 80's Woman's Weekly magazine did an article about the Shetland Islands and how the elderly ladies were teaching the young to carry on their knitting traditions.

The magazine offered readers a free wedding ring shawl knitting pattern, so I sent off my required stamped address envelope and a week later the pattern arrived. It was eight pages of solid text !!!!!

It looked way beyond my knitting ability so I just forgot about it. A couple of years later my parents and I were in a craft shop in Whitby and I noticed they sold one ply Shetland wool (the wool needed for the shawl). I was bored doing cross stitch so decided to have a go at making it. I had no idea how many skeins I'd need so just guessed the amount. As we didn't live locally the shop owner kindly suggested if I needed any more or had bought too much I could give her a ring and she's either send me more or buy back the spare skeins.

The scalloped edging was knitted first. There was only 10 stitches and 12 rows to the pattern, however I had to knit over 500 of them !!!!!!  

Using a very long circular needle I had to pick up about 1000 stitches from the first row of the scallops to form the body of the shawl. 

It seemed like every waking moment was spent working on the shawl. I remember it once took me all evening just to knit one row of the shawl..... Eventually after eight long weeks it was finished.

Now came the true test. Could it, as the name suggested, fit through a wedding ring? I borrowed my mams ring, and very carefully so not to break the yarn, fed the shawl through the ring. It worked !!!!

I'm proud of the shawl as it was the first time I'd ever used a circular knitting needle. I'd never knitted with anything as fine as one ply before and it's the most complex pattern I've ever come across.

Note: Apologies for the lack of shawl photos only it was put in the loft a few years ago and we now can't find it !!!!!!!

Update: We've finally found it so here are a couple of photos.

Have a great week.

Gertie xx

PS why not pop over to Handmade Monday to see what other fellow craft bloggers have been up to.