If you follow me on social media you’ll know that I’ve got something special planned for the Woollinn yarn festival! I’ve designed an exclusive shawl (Bealtaine) for the festival that will be in the show brochure but that’s not all, the shawl is knit using an exclusive colour for the Woollinn Festival called Woollinn!

The colour seems like the perfect festival colour, it’s a subtle blend of green with hint of blue that feels very much like an Irish sea. It’s very close to the colour of the Woollinn logo as well so really a match made in heaven!

Lisa from This is Knit (LYS in Dublin) who is the organiser of Woollinn is the wonderful model in the photos and Nadia (Cottage Notebook) who works as my VA has done an amazing job with the photographs. The elusive Irish sun even made an appearance for a glowing sunset.

Currently the shawl is only available as part of the festival brochure. 6 months after the festival I will make it available as a downloadable pattern. The yarn is also exclusive to the show BUT if you are coming to Woollinn you can pre-order a kit (5 skeins of Nua plus the brochure) from either my website or This Is Knit.  Kits will also be available from both our stands at the show. If we have any kits left after the show they will go on general release (but I can’t make any promises!)

Now that you know how the kits are available I’d love to tell you a little about the shawl! It’s basic design is a side-to-side biased vortex shaped shawl. You can see the first swatch I did up above which gives you an idea of how it fits together. You start with a small number of stitches and keep increasing on every row. Then periodically you’ll have several decreases on the other side which creates a zig-zag bottom edge to the shawl. While you are working these increases and decreases the pattern moves between garter and lace but the simple repeat makes it a breeze to decrease or increase the size of the shawl. Every time you finish a repeat you’ve got enough stitches left to start the next one so add or remove sections as you desire.

In the swatch I used a standard Elastic Bind-Off but the final shawl uses a Picot Bind-Off for a more decorative finish.

Last Saturday I did an Instagram live with Lisa on the Woollinn account and she saved the video for me to share with you :-)

So who’s coming to Woollinn at the end of the month? (Yes – it’s actually the first day of May today!!)