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The Thames Shawl is a Great Knit for Spring

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I’m starting to feel like knitting things for warmer weather as the temperature is slowly starting to creep up where I live, which means lighter weight fabrics and more lace are on the horizon.

The Thames shawl by Janina Kallio (aka Woolenberry) is a great one for spring because it features a lot of really simple lace combined with twisted stitches on a Reverse Stockinette Stitch background.

The lace is totally worked on Garter Stitch so there’s no purling or weird shaping on the wrong side, and it looks good on both sides so you don’t have to put too much thought into how you wear it. And it just uses two skeins of sock yarn (726 yards, to be precise) so you might already have yarn in your stash to make it.

You can grab the pattern on Ravelry for €6.50 (or about $7.76 at the time of writing).

[Photo: Woolenberry.]

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Knit a Hat with a Flock of Chickens

It’s well known (among knitters, anyway) that knitters seem to love chickens as a motif and a subject of our knitting projects. The Emotional Support Chicken and all the other chicken knitting patterns are just the beginning of our devotion to farmyard friends. 

For example, there’s Farmer Dennis’ Chicken Hat. This free pattern from Stacy Black is a simple worsted weight beanie sized for adults and decorate with a couple of little rounds of colorwork fences and a flock of chickens strutting around the body of the hat. 

You don’t need a lot of any of the colors for the chickens, their facial features or the fences, so this is a great project for using little leftover bits from other projects. The main color for the body of the hat is less than a skein using the yarn suggested, so you might just have everything you need in your house to start stitching up this hat right away. 

The colorwork is presented as a chart, with a 16 stitch section that repeats around the body of the hat. All the color changes are shown on the chart but I think it would be easier to knit the whole chicken in the chicken color and add the eye, beak and other features using duplicate stitch when the knitting is done. That way you don’t have to carry those yarns around the whole hat for just a few stitches. 

As the name suggests, the original hat was given to a farmer who shared their eggs, but anyone who raises chickens or just has a thing for the fowl is sure to love this cute hat. It wouldn’t be too difficult for someone new to stranded knitting or reading charts to make, either, so if that’s you, give it a try. 

The pattern is available for free on Ravelry. 

[Photo: Stacy Black]

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