Hello everyone! It’s been a while. This year has flown by without much knitting, but I’m finally back!!!! To kick things off, I thought it would be fun to knit one of my absolute favourite Fairy Tales – Rumplestiltskin.
Now, for those of you who know me, I really like the original versions of fairy tales…. deep, dark, and not always so very nice. You’re all familiar with the story of Rumplestiltskin, I’m sure, in which a miller wants to impress the king and brags that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king is intrigued, and locks the girl into a room overnight with a spinning wheel and straw, and says that if she does not spin all the straw into gold by the morning, she will die. While the poor girl was all alone frightened about her future and not knowing what to do, a small man appeared and asked why she was crying. When she explained the situation, he offered to spin the straw to gold for her in exchange for her necklace. He did, and the next morning the king was impressed. He took the miller’s daughter to an even larger room filled with straw and told her to spin this too into gold if she valued her life. Again the little man appeared and helped her in exchanged for the ring on her finger.
Of course the king had not yet satisfied his hunger of gold, but had the miller’s daughter taken into an even larger room full of straw and said “You’ll have to spin this into gold tonight, but if you succeed, you shall be my wife.” Again the girl was locked in the room and the little man appeared and offered to spin the straw into gold, but this time she had nothing more to give him in return. The man said “Then promise to give me your first child if you get to be queen.” The girl had no choice and gave the required promise, and again the man spun all the straw into gold. The king married her and she became queen.
A year later, she had a beautiful child and had forgotten all about the little man. Suddenly he appeared in her room and asked her to give him what she promised. The queen was horrified and offered him all the riches in the kingdom, if only she could keep her child, but the man refused. The queen cried so heart-rendingly that the little man took pity on her and said “I’ll give you three days’ time. If by then you know my name you can keep your child.”
The next day she went over all the names she knew, but each time the man said “That’s not my name.” The second day she sent servants near and far to ask about names, but no matter how strange or unusual, the man said “That’s not my name.” By the third day, one of her messengers returned and said “I haven’t discovered a single new name, but as I was walking along the edge of the forest, I saw a hut with a fire burning and a ridiculous little man dancing around the fire and bellowing: ‘Brew today, tomorrow bake, After that the child I’ll take, And sad the queen will be to lose it. Rumplestiltskin in my name But luckily nobody knows it.'”
You can’t imagine how happy the queen was to hear that name. When the little man turned up soon after he asked her “Well, Your Majesty, what’s my name?” She started by asking: Is it Tom? No. Is it Dick? No. Is it Harry? Could it be Rumplestiltskin?
The Devil told you that!!!! the little man screwed, and in his rage he sampled his right foot so hard that it went into the ground up to hos waist. Then in his fury he took his left foot in both hands and tore himself in two.
This story forms the basis of my new design. The pattern is available for pre-purchase on Ravelry for $6.00 USD and will be released as a Mystery KAL starting Oct 26. Clues posted every Friday for 3 consecutive weeks.
I have also teamed up with the Yarn Fairy, who has dyed yarn especially for this shawl. The yarn along with some stichmarkers and other goodies is available here. You will need two skeins of contrasting colour sock yarn (approx 430 yds of each).
