Resizing Faroese Shawls

Welcome to Day 8 of the Adjustable Shawls series! Today, we’re talking about adjustable Faroese shawls. What makes Faroese shawls adjustable, and how does resizing Faroese shawls work?

The Basics of Faroese Shawls

There’s a chapter in Shawl Design in Plain English and a post in the free shawl design course about the construction methods of Faroese shawls. If in doubt, you might consider to consult these resources first.

Resizing Traditional Faroese Shawls

To make a long story short: turning traditional Faroese shawls into adjustable Faroese shawls is not easy. The special shaping includes increase rows placed specifically to form the wing-like shape of these shawl shapes which makes it very difficult to introduce new pattern repeats or skip repeats.

If you insist on using traditional shaping you might want to use a pattern with raglan shaping to achieve this shawl shape. After the raglan section, the same principles as for triangle shawls apply here, too.

There’s an easy way of resizing Faroese shawls, though: Knitting them sideways.

Resizing Faroese Shawls – The Easy Way

I wrote earlier this year about the discovery of a new construction method for Faroese shawls by accident. When trying to design a crescent shawl worked sideways the prototype ended up being of Faroese shape after blocking! It was a complete surprise, but a happy one I have to admit.

You can read the full story here.

So finally, we have a construction method for Faroese shawls without increase rows which can be resized easily. It works as follows:

• Knit a vortex (cornucopia) shawl.
• Knit the mirror image of the above shawl.
• Join the two using a knitted-on center panel (or seam).
• Weave in ends and block.
• Admire the Faroese shawl shape.

As vortex (cornucopia) shawls are adjustable by default, this method gives us an easy way of resizing Faroese shawls! Just work as much of the cornucopia shawl as you need, then work its mirror image and then join them with a center panel.

How Not to Run Out of Yarn

The same principles as outlined in Your Most Important Tool apply here:

• Weigh your yarn before you start,
• Knit the first vortex (cornucopia) half until approximately 40% of the yarn have been used up (we need two halves and yarn for the center panel, too!),
• Knit the second half, and then
• Use the rest to knit and join the center panel.

Easy, isn’t it? Resizing Faroese shawls can be done without fiddling around with increase rows. Yay!

Any questions? Tried it yet? Make sure to let me know by leaving a comment below!