A beautiful curl of color, with beads to enhance and delight! Back again...
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The Design
Here is a lovely design by Jennifer Leigh. Here is how she describes her Fire Thief:
This pattern is a three-dimensional shawl meant to wrap cozily around your neck and shoulders, and stay put without any pinning or slipping.
It starts with a circle designed to cup one shoulder, and continues into a Curl that wraps nicely around your neck. Knit it as long and large as you personally prefer!
... The motifs are designed so the shawl doesn’t have a right and a wrong side; everything is in reversible knit/purl patterns. There are also optional beads. :-) I hope you enjoy knitting this as much as me!
Jennifer designed this with the idea of creating a circular start that at some point breaks free to be worked back and forth, rather than having circles or triangles or simple rectangles. So you will find this design has a most intriguing new technique to learn and play with.
The Yarn
The original yarn that Jennifer used in the shawl you see on this page was the Abstract Fibers colorway Bonfire on the base Temptation. She felt that that complimented the stitch pattern that was evocative of flames and the colorway’s short stretches of color allowed for three to four stitch pops of color to occasionally stack to make little snaps and flashes.
Unfortunately, though I did try I wasn't able to get this yarn in for us here. The yarn we offer can be seen in the lower left-hand corner of the top photo on this page and again below that.
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This colorway to my eye is a wonderful one to mimic glowing embers....
From MadTosh, the yarn is Tosh Mo Light, 80% superwash merino + 20% mohair with 420 yards (384m) per skein. This colorway is called Firewood. This is a variegated beauty of rich browns with tonal variations of gold and amber with shadows of purple as well. Gorgeous!
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Each kit will include one skein of yarn so you will have 420 yards, enough for the small, the medium, or the large size of this beautiful shawl which is what is shown here.
The extra large is the one shown here and would need an extra skein.
The Beads
Now when it came time to decide on the beads, Jennifer leaves them optional, and up to the individual knitter.
She does indicate on the charts where they could go well but she does not give a number needed --- all she writes is "minimum of several thousand, depending on knitter's choice."
Whoa!
Well, I queried Jennifer and she wrote to me that the small only takes 188, the medium takes 426 and the large takes 760 beads. It is only when one gets into the extra large size that one needs thousands.
So here is what we're going to do: each kit will include two 35 gram containers of 6/0 beads (about 840 beads) , picked to work well with the yarn color.
If you have a preference on bead color, tell me. Otherwise I will choose for you -- I am tending towards golden ones.
The Pattern
Note that the kit will not automatically include the pattern and the cost of the pattern has not been added.
I know some knitters prefer to get it directly as a PDF file of the pattern from Jennifer via her Ravelry web page. In that case, set our Pattern drop-down menu to "No Pattern Needed" as you will be getting it elsewhere.
Alternatively, if you would like a printed copy, please make sure the drop-down menu is set to that.
We also offer the pattern as a downloadable PDF.
