Knitting a Free Your Fade Shawl

The Free Your Fade shawl is a pretty simple pattern, consisting of garter stitch and eyelet rows. Instructions are included for both fingering weight and DK, but the pattern is simple enough that you could use pretty much any yarn weight depending on what look you're going for. It's also quite a flexible pattern, with instructions that can be used to include as many or as few colours as you'd like. In addition, I think it'd be easy to adjust your shawl to be larger or smaller depending on what size you'd prefer and how much yarn you have.

I opted to knit my shawl using fingering weight yarn and stuck to the original pattern, so this meant I used three colours. The yarn was a set of three skeins from Beehive Yarns, which I had purchased at Yarndale, the colours are 'Raven Red', 'Tapestry' and 'Teal Appeal'. All of these skeins are on the 'Audrey' base which is 75% superwash merino and 25% nylon, each skein is 425 metres (465 yards). I thought this set of three would work really nicely for a Free Your Fade, as 'Tapestry' includes red and teal tones so sits really nicely between the other two colours. When deciding what order to use the skeins in I took a look at the photos of the sample and saw that the first colour would be the least visible, so I opted to use 'Raven Red' first, followed by 'Tapestry' and then 'Teal Appeal'. The pattern calls for 200 yards of colour A and 400 yards of colours B and C, so I do have a lot of 'Raven Red' left, but also quite a bit of 'Tapestry' and 'Teal Appeal' remaining too. I didn't knit a gauge swatch since I knew correct sizing wasn't essential for a shawl, which may have contributed to me having so much spare.

This was actually the first shawl I'd ever knitted so I wasn't sure what to expect. I found getting started with it to be very easy and it grows pretty quickly in the beginning which is fun to see. The pattern is really nice and simple, it's largely a two row repeat with a couple of different rows for the eyelets at intervals throughout. I found that after a little while I didn't need to be looking at the pattern; I could just count my rows and remember what I needed to do based on whether I was on an odd or an even row. I did have to pay a bit more attention for the eyelet sections, but it was still simple enough that I only had to briefly check over the pattern when starting those rows. I found it really fun to knit; it was exciting to add each colour and see how it looked as part of the shawl. Towards the end of the project the rows do get quite long, so it can be a bit of a slog, but the sections didn't have a huge number of rows so I didn't find myself getting bored of it. Other projects were largely put down whilst I was knitting this, because I was just excited to work on my shawl each day.

As well as being my first shawl, this was also my first time knitting a picot bind off. I was a bit nervous to get to the end of the project, as I was thinking it'd be a bit complicated. When I actually got to the bind off and read the instructions it was really straightforwards, once I'd got the hang of it I could get through it pretty quickly. There were a lot of stitches to bind off so it did take me quite some time, I decided to just spend a Saturday afternoon working on it and I was really glad I did it in one sitting rather than stopping and starting on it. My only issue with the bind off is that some of the picots do look a little bit messy, with some loose strands of yarn, so I was maybe binding off a bit too loosely. However, overall this doesn't bother me and if it did I could probably pull at the surrounding stitches to even it out and tighten up these strands.

Overall I'm really happy with the finished shawl and can definitely see myself knitting another one, perhaps a DK version next time. If you've never knit a shawl before this one is a really great option; it's easy and enjoyable, I would definitely recommend anyone interested gives it a go. The only thing I'd probably do differently if I knit another one is that I'd probably use three more speckled yarns, rather than tonal colourways as I think it would hide the colour changes a bit more and just give it a bit of a different look.