Attack of the Giant Killer Shawl

I set out a month ago to knit the most enormous shawl I could muster. Four mini-skeins and three-and-a-half full skeins of yarn later, I’ve done it.

In alternating colours and stitch patterns that slowly work up to a massive arching work of art, Painting Rainbows is a semicircle shawl designed by Stephen West, one of my favourite knitwear designers. Formerly from Kansas and now living in Amsterdam, Stephen is best known in the knitting world for his gigantic shawl patterns, each boasting a wild array of stitches or colours, or both.

Painting Rainbows uses one main colour and up to eight complementary colours in a striping pattern. For mine, I wanted to use these moody jewel tones I bought from Rose Hill Yarns — the Okanagan Summer Party set, featuring teal, yellow, two shades of pink, and a variegated yarn with all those colours combined.

In between these minis, I used my Rainbow Qiviut yarn, a magenta-gold-blue coloured yarn made just up the road in Nisku using supersoft, super warm, muskoxen fibre. Qiviut is 100% Inuit-owned, processing muskox hides from start to finish (including milling, spinning, and dyeing) that they source directly as a byproduct of the food industry in the Northwest Territories, where founder Tanis Simpson is originally from.

For my main colour, I used Sassy Strings‘ Blackberry shade, a stunning purple-grey number. I ended up having to order two extra skeins of it as my shawl devoured the yarn. Blocking this beast was a feat as well, as it was relegated to the bathtub in our guest bathroom due to the fact that the sink I usually use wasn’t big enough. And I had to employ all 12 of my foam blocking mats and some brand-new blocking wires to wrangle its sheer size and keep the lines neat.

The resulting shawl is even more sweeping and beautiful than I could have ever imagined. It’s so big, I could wear it as a cardigan. A Shardigan? Shawldigan? It’s delightfully flowy as well.

I have strong opinions about shawls and the requisite girth, any shawl that you can’t wrap yourself into like a yarny burrito is but a liar and a scarf — and this is the perfect burrito-worthy shawl for me!