The Rectangular South Bay Shawl

The sense of accomplishment when you finish a project and you can tick it off your wip-list ……. wonderful!

I noticed I was starting to feel a bit restless when looking at the number of unfinished things that were lying around in my studio and it was time to do something about that.

This means this post is another “ta-dah”: my rectangular South Bay Shawl is all done and my-oh-my I’m so very happy with how it turned out!

After having made a lot of the traditional South Bay Shawls (see here), that I still enjoy making, I wondered how this pattern would look in a non-triangular shape.
My go-to source is the internet, and sure enough I found a crochet chart pretty soon.
I downloaded the image onto my iPad – it was all I needed at that time. Being pretty familiar with the original pattern, I mainly wanted it to know how many chains made for one motif and the way the straight sides were crocheted.

In the process of writing this blog post, I searched for the link to the original source of this chart and no matter how many ways of googling I tried: nowhere to be found.
Should any of you know the lovely person who took the time to figure out this rectangular version and made the crochet chart for all of us to enjoy, please let me know.
I would really like to properly credit her/him here and link to her/his website!
In the meantime I’ve pinned the chart to my Crochet Board on Pinterest, here is where you can find it.

Although I think I’ll be wearing it in mainly in winter, the shawl will forever remind me of this year’s summer vacation, because on the long drive to and from the South of France this shawl is what kept me busy.
I’ve always disliked getting car sick the minute I got in a car and laid my eyes on a book, so you can understand I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to crochet in the car and feel perfectly fine! Ah …… the bliss of crochet …..!

Another pleasure was the yarn I picked out: “Alize Diva Missisipi” – it’s odd that one “s” and a “p” are missing, but this is what the label says. The label says “silk effect” too, and that’s definitely true: very soft, silky, on the heavy side, but such a joy to work with. Given the fact that the yarn is very thin, I decided to use two strands and a hook size 5. The yarn itself being “variegated” already, makes the shawl look “variegated on steroids”, but I really, really like that.
What border to put on puzzled me for a long time ….. Going through books, browsing the internet – no click whatsoever, until, until I found this beautiful bobble border tutorial on the equally beautiful Dover & Madden-blog: simple but very effective, and exactly what I wanted.

Love,
Marianne