Lovely in Lace Knitting Pattern: Design Inspiration

The Lovely in Lace Wrap knitting pattern designed by Snickerdoodle Knits (that's me!) is now available for purchase! (Learn more & purchase the pattern here.) This design was originally created for the Tippy Tree Yarns Audrey Hepburn advent shawl MKAL of December 2020. Tiffany, the dyer behind Tippy Tree Yarns, asked me to design a rectangular shawl that represented Audrey Hepburn, and gave me three adjectives: “classy, elegant, and understated.” I felt like the only path for this design was to create something with simple lace motifs, and of course, the feather and fan stitch motif had to be incorporated.

(Also: Tiffany is already planning doing more "icon" advent MKALs... it'll be a semi-annual July and December thing, and I'll definitely be designing the next one ~ it's currently available for purchase in her shop here! Missed the July 2021 MKAL advent? Sign up for Tiffany's newsletter so you hear about the next one!)

Designing the Lovely in Lace Wrap was a new - and fun - challenge for me as a knitwear designer. Tiffany reached out and asked if I would design a rectangular wrap for her four mini-skein advent calendar. I had a lot on my plate, and time was tight with a capital T, but it was an opportunity I didn’t want to let slip.

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I’d never been a part of an MKAL before, let alone design one. With my previous designs, I'd always had the liberty to design what I liked as I was inspired, and with the yarn/colors I chose. Here, I was supposed to design a rectangular shawl that was classy and understated, with clues that were all approximately the same length in knitting time (definitely the hardest part!), and wasn’t too difficult for knitters (but Audrey Hepburn screamed for lace!).

I ended up selecting three simplistic lace motifs that coordinated well together: feather and fan lace, herringbone lace, and fern lace. The stitches do require some concentration, but each row includes multiple repeats across, and each section includes multiple repeats of a small number of rows.

If you’ve never worked lace before but are familiar with increasing or decreasing stitches (i.e. K2tog, KFB, and YO), you already know how to work lace, so don’t let that term scare you. Plus, I like to say that all of knitting, regardless of the stitches, is the same: you just follow one instruction at a time, and (almost) everything is just a version of a knit or a purl. (Of course, as with all Snickerdoodle Knits patterns, the pattern includes linked video tutorials for all of the increase and decrease stitches, to help walk you through anything unfamiliar - like the SSK or SKP - with confidence.)

To determine the sequencing of colors, I split sections into thirds and created a sort of fade concept by switching back and forth between colors. If you prefer your shawl in color blocks, though, you can easily adjust the color placements! You can also adjust the number of colors that you use within the shawl and the number of repeats for each section, which in turn adjusts the length!

I hope you have a lot of fun selecting your colors and knitting this fun, engaging, and interesting knit. If you like some interest to your knit, a little concentration required with lots of simple repeats, and changing stitch patterns, you’re going to love this design.

If you weren't a part of the Advent MKAL, you can learn more & view purchasing options here. If you're interested in joining the next MKAL, you can purchase the July 2020 MKAL Shawl kit, or if there's not an MKAL currently available, be sure you're following Tippy Tree Yarns for updates!

Interested in a fun fact? I changed my mind about one section after I'd knit it up (I originally knitted it longer), but I didn't have time to go back and change it (my test knitters were waiting on me, so I ended up performing yarn surgery on my sample of the design while the advent knitters were working on their projects. It was a fun bonus to the whole surprise element!