Cornucopia Shawl Stitch Patterns

Most knitting charts come as rectangles but shawl shapes vary. Today we’re going to talk about cornucopia shawl stitch patterns and cornucopia shawl design.

This post is part of my article series about adapting stitch patterns. You can browse the table of contents here:

Adapting Stitch Patterns for All Shawl Shapes: Table of Contents

It’s an updated version of an earlier post about vortex shawl design, I recently renamed vortex shawls to cornucopia shawls which describes the shape much better and is easier to imagine.

What Are Cornucopia Shawls?

Cornucopia shawls are described in detail in my earlier post The Horn of Plenty: Cornucopia Shawls, and you can learn how to design shawls of this shape in Cornucopia Shawl Design. If you’re new I encourage you to read this article first to get an overview about their shape and construction methods.

Cornucopia Shawl Design

In shawl design fitting shape, stitch pattern and yarn together is the secret sauce to success. Cornucopia shawls are basically biased triangles – triangles worked sideways, but with combined decreases and increases as described in Cornucopia Shawl Design.

You can construct a cornucopia shawl by increasing steadily on one side of the triangle and decrease any amount of stitches – as long as you decrease less than you’re increasing in total – every few rows.

A simple example is increasing one stitch every row and decreasing three stitches every six rows:

• Row 1 (RS): K1, YO, k to end. (N+1 sts)
• Row 2 (WS): Knit to last stitch, YO, k1. (N+2 sts)
• Row 3 (RS): K1, YO, k to end. (N+3 sts)
• Row 4 (WS): Knit to last stitch, YO, k1. (N+4 sts)
• Row 5 (RS): K1, YO, k to end. (N+5 sts)
• Row 6 (WS): K4tog, knit to last stitch, YO, k1. (N+6-3 = N+3 sts)

I call this a “6/3 Cornucopia”: We increase six stitches and decrease three stitches per repeat. Let’s have a look at the corresponding chart as shown below.

Cornucopia Shawl Stitch Patterns

The section available for stitch patterns is the section outlined in black. You can choose any number of stitches for your repeat not only the one stitch repeat shown in the chart above.

Stitches right and left from it are what I commonly refer to as side stitches. These side stitches are usually not available for the pattern’s repeat. You can fill them up but you don’t need to, except if your stitch patterns has unpaired decreases or increases at the edges (same as for every stitch pattern!).

An example for an 8/4 cornucopia shawl (eight increases, four decreases – a total of 4 decreases per repeat) is shown in the chart below.

I strongly recommend using charts with eight row repeats for 8/x shawls, six row repeats for 6/x  cornucopia shawls, etc. It really makes things much simpler to have a chart that has the same amount of rows each repeat as your decreases have.

This article hopefully helps you with cornucopia shawl stitch patterns and how to include them in new cornucopia shawl designs. Let me know by leaving a comment below!