The time has come to introduced you all to the Vines and Vale shawl. Over the last couple of years I’ve been experimenting with brioche and this shawl was designed to pass on some of the skills I’ve been learning as well as looking beautiful and keeping you warm! Earlier this month I had a wonderful group of knitters that joined me on my Cork knitting retreat. This was the project I designed for them to work on while we learned about 2-colour brioche.

 

As you are learning brioche it is intimidating to have a lot of stitches on your needle – it takes a lot longer to correct mistakes! For that reason this shawl starts with only a few stitches and grows from there. You can see that the shawl curves along the top edge, this is created by increasing at the start of the light side rows and decreasing at the end of the row. Starting with just a few stitches allows you to make mistakes and learn as you work.

 

Once you have enough stitches you’ll then begin working the pattern along the bottom edge. This has both charted and written directions. I found that I began with the written directions but then as I got more comfortable with the pattern I moved onto the chart and begin to read it more easily and see how the work and chart fitted together. Until the edge section of the shawl you will have that same pattern repeated at the edge with the rest of the shawl before it worked in plain 2-colour brioche.

 

When you’re ready to finish off you will finally work the pattern across all the edge stitches which creates a very attractive finish and a nicely undulating edge.

I’m so happy with this shawl, the brioche isn’t very complicated (it does take practice to master) but even simple stitches create a dramatic effect! This shawl used just 2 skeins of each colour, although I used almost every last bit of the light colour.

If you’d like to knit this shawl you can find the pattern on ravelry here and on my website here. Remember that code MEETCAROL is still vaild until the end of April for a 20% discount!

If you’d like to get a yarn kit for the shawl you can find them here and there are several different colour options available.

Now if you would like to knit this shawl but find 2-colour brioche intimidating you’ll be happy to hear that I’m putting a Teachable video class together for it! I’m on the last 2 videos  so hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll be able to tell you all about the class! If you purchase the shawl pattern I’ll send you on a discount code (to the value of the pattern) for the class.

Have fun with your brioche!