Fairy Tale Lace is a collection of 7 lace shawl patterns and the fairy tales that inspired the designs. I’ve been releasing the patterns one at a time since last summer, and the final pattern was just released last week.
I’ve always been fond of fairy tales. Throughout history, they have been used to amuse, teach, inspire, frighten and entertain all generations. It’s only in more recent times that fairy tales have been considered ‘stories for children’. Many of the traditional fairy tales contain elements targeted at an older audience, and these are really my favourite versions. There is usually a very clear division between the heroes of the story, which tend to be good, and the wicked, who tend to be not just a little naughty, but all out evil. And they always get their just desserts in the end. At least almost always.
In this collection, several of the patterns are from stories collected by the Brothers Grimm. Most of us have probably heard these stories time and time again, both as children and then later as adults. We have the Pied Piper (or the Rat-catcher of Hameln), Hansel and Gretel and Rapunzel. The Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland showed up with his stripes and ever-so-famous grin. There’s the sad Danish story by HC Andersen about the Little Match Girl who froze to death one cold New Years Eve. There is also a beautiful Chippewa tale called the Star of Earth, and a Greek myth about how Persephone was doomed to spend half of the year in the underworld with Hades.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy these patterns as much as I have. I have a hunch that this is not the last Fairy Tale collection I create, so if you have a favourite fairy tale you’d like to see as a future pattern, let me know. I may just take requests. 
In the meantime, the Fairy Tale Lace collection is available as an e-book for CDN $20.
All of the patterns are also available as individual downloads on Ravelry, for various amounts depending on the complexity of the pattern.
Enjoy!!
Rapunzel Infinity is a completely reversible infinity scarf. It features lace and reversible cables, and is knit flat and grafted together at the end.
Rapunzel is a German fairy tale in which an enchantress has imprisoned a young girl in a tower. Rapunzel has long, golden hair, and she lowers her braid from the tower so that the enchantress can visit her. One day a prince pretends to be the enchantress, visits her and they fall in love. They plan her escape, but the enchantress finds out and casts out Rapunzel. She then pretends to be Rapunzel, and the prince climbs up to meet her. When she tells him he will never see Rapunzel again, he leaps from the tower in despair and is blinded by the thorns below.
Rapunzel’s braid is shown in the centre of the infinity scarf, surrounded by thorns growing below the tower on both sides.
The fun thing with an infinity scarf is that there are so many different ways of wearing it. Short. Long. Wrapped around the head. As a vest.
The Rapunzel Infinity pattern is available as a PDF download, both in single pattern form for CDN $5.00
Or in the Fairy Tale Lace e-book, which includes a total of 7 patterns for CDN $20
Happy pi-day, everyone!
Here are four of my pi-shawls.
Clockwise from the top:
Mystic Star, Star of Earth, Ra and Apep, Eyjafjallajökull Shawl
A pi-shawl is a circular shawl using the so called pi-shawl construction, as described by Elizabeth Zimmerman. It relies on the relationship between the circumference of the shawl (the number of stitches) and the radius of the shawl (the number of rounds, counting out from the centre). Basically, each time the radius doubles, the circumference doubles. And since knit fabric is stretchy by nature, it’s sufficient to double the number of stitches every time the radius doubles. The stitches are increased in special increase rounds which are worked [k1, yo] to the end.
When knitting in the round, repeating a fairly simple pattern will result in a much more complex-looking pattern. These shawls use both lace patterning and “negative space” – that is the plain stockinette separating the lace patterns – to create the overall patterns.
I’ve been hard at work for the past few months preparing for the next book release. A couple of weeks ago I drove down to Boston to meet with Caro Sheridan for the photo shoot. We spent a day in the studio and she took lots of lovely pictures that will be in the book.
There were many shawls to photograph, and my jobs included keeping track of the shawls (to make sure they all got photographed), and styling them on the model.
Sometimes the styling was as simple as smoothing out the fabric.
And sometime the draping was more complicated, to make sure the lace patterning was showing as much as possible.
There was also some playing around, to capture the shawl in motion.
Now that we have the pictures, we’ve sorted through them to select the best ones. Caro is working on the colour-balancing and what not, and soon they will be delivered to the publisher so they can be included in the book.
Hansel and Gretel is a German fairy tale, from the Grimm fairy tales. Hansel and Gretel are children in a starving family. Their stepmother convince their father to abandon the children in the forest. The children overhear the plan, and gather pebbles that they use to mark their way home. At night, when the moon and the stars are up, they return home. The next day, they are once again brought into the woods. This time they mark their way home with breadcrumbs, but they are eaten by the birds, and the children are lost in the woods. They wander and find a gingerbread cottage belonging to a witch.
The body of the shawl is split into thirds. The centre shows the starlit night, surrounded by solid stockinette for the darker parts of the sky, and the edging represents the decorations on the gingerbread house.
It’s knit using one skein of Handmaiden Marrakesh in amethyst, and on 3.75 mm needles. It’s available as part of the Fairy Tale Lace e-book, as well as in single pattern form.
The e-book is available for CDN $20
And if you’d just like a copy of Gretel’s Shawl, it’s available in PDF format for CDN $6.00
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