Off the Needles: Eifelgold Shawl

One of my purchases at this year's Carolina Fiber Fest was a kit for knitting Eifelgold, a shawl that has been a popular knit-along project in this area.

The kit included the pattern and 2 skeins of fingering weight superwash merino yarn from The Fibre Studio, out of Charlotte, NC, The main color is 5 ounces in "Noir" and the contrasting color is 3 ounces of "Holly."

The pattern is made up of solid-color areas of garter stitch and two-color areas of a slip-stitch or mosaic stitch, easy knitting since mosaic stitch (unlike fair isle) requires only one color to be carried along a row. 

I did have a bit of trouble getting started: you begin by casting on 8 stitches and make increases on right-side rows. I kept messing up my count in the first 7 or 8 rows partly because the yarn plies split a little and partly because it was hard to see the stitches in the black yarn. I had just about given up hope of getting going with the project when I went to a film class where another knitter had brought her almost-finished Eifelgold shawl. I was dumbfounded at her progress since it was only a week after the Fiber Fest. But she told me that she didn't get the yarn at the festival; it was from a knit-along at one of the local yarn shops and she had been knitting it for several weeks. 

Inspired by her progress, I went home determined that before the end of our class I would have the shawl done and ready to show her my version. And 3 weeks later I had finished all but the blocking. I can't say there weren't still a lot of rows that I had to frog and reknit because of losing a stitch, but overall it was a very satisfying project. It has been a lot of years since I had done any mosaic knit patterns, so it was nice to know that they still give me knitting pleasure.