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All About Carrie’s Shawl from And Just Like That

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The knitting community tends to pay attention when lovely knits appear in shows and movies, so there’s been a bit of buzz this week about Carrie Bradshaw’s shawl/blanket from episode 6 of “And Just Like That.”

What looks like a blanket in this screenshot (that fuzzy striped sweater looks pretty great, too) is actually a shawl, the Lauren Wrap by Gabriella Hearst, to be exact. This multicolored beauty was hand knit by the artists at Manos del Uruguay and has a retail price of $2650.

The Gabriella Hearst website says the shawl is cashmere, and I don’t think Manos has a cashmere base they sell as yarn. The closest I can find is Franca, a super bulky merino that looks like it is dyed in a similar way.

It is a multicolored, hand-knit shawl made by the artists at Manos del Uruguay. The website states that the shawl is made of cashmere, but it’s not specified if it was hand knit or machine knit. The retail price of the shawl is $2650. The shawl is large enough to cocoon the model on the website and the fringe trails almost to the floor.

 

The website doesn’t give the dimensions for the shawl, but it’s huge. Shown on a model on the website she’s completely cocooned and the fringe trails almost to the floor.

If you wanted to create a similar look for yourself, look for a bulky or super bulky hand dyed yarn with short color runs. It’s often difficult (and expensive!) to find indie dyers with this quantity of the same color of yarn, however. Some Etsy sellers with similar looking yarn include The Sheepy Shire, THREADS by Megan Nicole and Brediculous Yarns.

You could also choose a mass-produced bulky or super bulky like We Are Knitters The Wool (which has a hand-painted option) or The Petite Wool, Lion Brand Mandala Watercolor or Mandala Thick & Quick, Wonderfluff Ombre or Chroma Twist Bulky from KnitPicks or something similar. Or hold multiple strands of stash together for a scrappy look on a budget.

The shawl looks to be a giant triangle worked in Stockinette Stitch. You could use a pattern like Stephen West’s Boneyard (link on Ravelry) without the purl ridges, using bulky yarn and appropriate-sized needles for the yarn you’re using. Make it as big as you like and add super-long fringe for a AJLT inspired super cozy shawl blanket!

 

Comments

  1. Splendid article with all the right details, helpful links, and insights that address all the speculations. Great style too. Thank you.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]