Resizing Rhomboid Shawls

May 6, 2017 Julia

Welcome to Day 7 of the Adjustable Shawls series! Today, we’re talking about adjustable rhomboid shawls. What makes rhombus shawls adjustable, and how does resizing rhomboid shawls work?

The Basics of Rhomboid 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 rhomboid shawls. If in doubt, you might consider to consult these resources first.

Rhomboids (parallelograms) are constructed by combining triangles with rectangle shawl elements. So if we want to make a rhomboid shawl adjustable, we need our kitchen scale again.

Resizing Rhomboid Shawls — Parallelogram construction in shawl design: asymmetrical triangles and a rectangle. Knitting direction is horizontal (left to right or the other way round)

Making Rhomboid Shawls Adjustable

Weigh the yarn you have available first and write down the number. Start knitting the increase section (the first triangle, increases on one side only) until your shawl is of desired width. Weigh your yarn again. The difference between the two numbers is the amount of yarn needed for one triangle. As the same triangle, just mirrored, will be knitted at the end of the shawl, we need to subtract the triangle yarn amount twice from the original weight. The result is the yarn we have available for the center (straight) section of the parallelogram.