Have you ever come across Celtic knotwork designs? If not, you can find out more about them here. I’ve been a fan of these intricate, endless knots for a number of years, and in my cross stitch days I stitched a couple of knotwork designs. However, although they would seem to lend themselves perfectly to knitted cable designs, I was never able to imagine how cables could be persuaded to go in the appropriate directions and close themselves off when necessary. This was before I came across Lucy Hague’s patterns – including a family of celtic shawls containing all the impossible knotwork cables. I’ve mentioned them before, as I bought the patterns directly from Lucy at the Glasgow School of Yarn last autumn and some yarn from Ginger Twist Studios to make the first shawl, but I’ve been very neglectful and forgotten to mention them further.
Kyna is the first of Lucy’s shawls that I knitted. It was specifically chosen because it looked by far the most straightforward of the designs!
This shawl is worked sideways, and has a much simpler cable design, running along the side of the work (along the bottom of the finished shawl). 
The yarn turned out to be slightly too variegated to show the cables to full effect, but it was such a lovely colour and so soft that I couldn’t resist it!
I’ve also just finished a second of Lucy’s shawls: Nine Maidens, again in a Ginger Twist yarn (Bleating Velvet 4 ply in Grey Gardens). Unfortunately I won’t be able to block it for a while (starting to redecorate, so no space to lay out my foam mats for a while!), so there’ll be no pictures of the finished object for a few weeks, but I thought some progress pictures might give an idea of what it’s like:
This is a bit more difficult than Kyna, as you may be able to tell! I realised as I got to the end of the most intricate bit of the cables that I had made a mistake 8 rows back – frogging 8 rows of 450+ stitches having forgotten to put in a lifeline isn’t my favourite way to spend a couple of evenings, but better than seeing a mistake in each of the nine pattern repeats every time I looked at the shawl. On the second attempt I managed to keep to the pattern – or at least I didn’t make any mistakes that I’ve found yet! Here’s a picture of one of the completed motifs (unblocked, obviously), showing the closed loop cables and the beautiful yarn:
I’ve come to love Lucy’s designs and I’ve been stashing some yarn that I think will be suitable for some of the other shawls. More of that another time!
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