A Knit Shawl with a Touch of Braille

Designer Donielle Oliver Showvay has always admired Helen Keller’s determination to overcome her difficulties, and she has had to deal with vision loss since childhood, as well as her mother’s hearing loss.

The Helen’s Heart Braille Shawl calls for a lot of different techniques, which we’ll get to in a minute, but there’s a section of the shawl that uses bobbles to spell out in braille a quote by Helen Keller: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”

The designer says the cable hearts and lace hearts surrounding the Braille quote were chosen specifically for their tactile nature as visually impaired people would be able to feel this stitches easily. They also happen to be fun to knit and add to the expression of love found in the pattern.

In addition to cables, lace and bobbles, you’ll also find a bit of brioche knitting in this pattern, and an I-cord edging. Video tutorials are included in the pattern for those who might need help with any of these techniques.

The pattern uses three colors of superfine yarn and is a long rectangle with short ends that come to points. In some photos of the project you can see tassels added at these ends but that’s totally optional.

Elements of the design are shown in charts in the pattern, but there’s also a line by line written out pattern for the visually impaired who might want to create this pattern.

Of course if you know braille or get a copy of the alphabet, you could make the center section say whatever you like, just chart it out in the same way the original pattern was done.

You can find this pattern on Etsy.

[Photo: Donielle Oliver Showvay]

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts.

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts.

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects.

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version.

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want.

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do.

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like.

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.

Have you read?