Inspiration For Knitted Lace Shawls: Plant Anatomy

Note: this is the original post that started the whole Plant Anatomy project. It was originally published on June 3, 2015 on my former website jriede.com. I moved the original post here to keep the documentation of the whole project in one place.

Yesterday evening, enjoying a glass of wine while browsing Pinterest, I came across a beautiful illustration of plant anatomy from a book dating back to 1680: Nehemiah Grew, The Anatomy of Plants. (A comprehensive article on the work on Nehemiah Grew can be found here.)

The image had been pinned from the article BibliOdyssey – Plant Anatomy Charts on the patternbank.com blog. There are more.

I’m thinking of creating a series of lace shawls based on these inspirational pictures. What do you think? I imagine knitted lace shawls in earthy shades of greens and browns, worked in natural fibers like Alpaca, Merino or blends. Feel free to have a look on my new board Knitting Lace Inspiration on Pinterest.

A short Google search reveiled a PDF of the book – it’s in public domain.

When I came across this picture, I seriously introducing a new shawl shape: stoles with round ends.

What do you think?