Adjustable Shawls

January 16, 2019 Julia

In this article you’ll learn everything about adjustable shawls: How to create them, how to make specific shawl shapes adjustable, how to resize shawls, how to turn existing shawl knitting patterns into adjustable shawl patterns and much more. Size matters, so make these shawl patterns fit your needs!

The topic is so broad I decided to split this huge article into a few, smaller ones. I hope the new structure will increase readability, and I’d be more than happy to hear from you. Please just leave a comment below this article if you have any suggestions. Thank you!

What Are Adjustable Shawls?

Adjustable shawls are shawls where you can freely decide how many repeats you knit and no matter how many repeats you decide to work, the design still works. Adjustable shawls are adaptable in size and can be easily resized. Yarn usage can be calculated in advance so left-overs can be minimised. Another benefit is that you’ll not be worried about running out of yarn before your project is finished.

What Makes a Shawl Adjustable? How To Resize Knitted Shawls?

A shawl is considered to be adjustable if adjusting its size is easy and straightforward. Lace (or otherwise heavily patterned) shawls are considered to be adjustable if it doe not matter how many repeats of each lace pattern you work in each section, you can always start the next section without having to adjust your stitch count first.

The most simple example for an adjustable shawl is a triangle shawl worked sideways worked in garter stitch or any other simple stitch pattern that does not include any repeats: just knit each row, increasing one stitch every other row until your shawl is of desired size or you get bored.

For intricate lace patterns, it’s a different story. As the story of resizing knitted shawls is not told in a few lines or a paragraph alone, I wrote a whole article only about how to resize knitted shawls, especially dealing with resizing more complex patterns. You can find it here: How to Resize Shawls and I strongly recommend reading it to get a further understanding about how resizing shawls works.

Your Most Important Tool

Imagine you found a lovely skein of hand dyed lace weight yarn you plan to knit a shawl with. Unfortunately, it’s one of a kind and you only got one. How do you make sure not to run out of yarn in the middle of your knitting project?

The answer is simple: as soon as you have used half of your skein. But how to know when you used up half of it – by magic? Counting yards? Or by measuring it?

Nothing sounds very practical so far. But we got the solution: The most useful adjustable shawl tool is nothing fancy, but just your ordinary kitchen scale. You can read more (and see my kitchen scale in action) here.

Adjustable Shawls: The Course Schedule (Historical)

This article has been part of an online course on adjustable shawls and back then, it had a course schedule. I’m keeping it here for merely historical reasons. All articles linked below are linked in the corresponding paragraphs above, too.