Stella Shawl

Look at this awesome shawl! This gorgeous piece of crochet is Stella Shawl!

The shawl is designed by an incredibly talented Julme Conradie @mysquarehat. The pattern can be found on Ravelry. Julme got the inspiration to this shawl from knitted Ewe Rock shawl, designed by Susanne Sommer (@sosuknits).

This is my second shawl designed by Julme. Crochet Your Fade, from last year, was the first one. I've been using that shawl every day for the past half year :) You can read about that from here.

This shawl project was an extra or a surprise project for me because I always plan before hand what projects I do and when. In late February, Julme contacted me and asked me to test this Stella pattern.  I was and I am still very delighted of this honor. It helped a lot that I  didn't have to finish the whole shawl right away. The test period was two weeks and I needed to test the start section and repeat section few times.  My winter holiday week gave me a good peace for the testing. 

I crocheted the shawl from Scheepjes Whirl, the color is Raspberry Rocky Road and Sandnes Garn's Mandarin Petit (black). The hook I used was 3.5 mm.

The wingspan of the shawl is 200 cm and the depth (in the longest part) is 110 cm. 

It´s one huge shawl !!

This was the first time I tested any pattern and it was an interesting process. You need to concentrate very differently to the pattern and make a good notes of everything.  In two weeks, I got the test section ready and sent my notes to Julme. 

Here are the start stitches of the shawl

Test part finished!

The construction of the shawl is very interesting.  On the other side, there is stripes that are from color-changing front post double crochet stitches of the Whirl, and on the other side there is black stripes from front post double crochet stitches of the the Mandarin Petit.

This shawl was very nice and interesting to crochet. The pattern is constructed from four row repeat, so it can be very well memorized (although I always kept the pattern nearby so that I could double check that I was doing right). The pattern is based on sections that are formed from single crochet stitch and linen / moss / granite stitch, with front post double crochet stitch between the sections.  And of course it was interesting to wait the Whirl to change the color :)

I didn´t wet block this shawl because I didn´t want to make it any bigger.  I blocked the shawl and sparyed water on it and let it dry. 

This was a quite long project. It took me about four months to crochet this. But it was very enjoyable journey :) Or course, I have finished a lot of other projects during this shawl project . But I´m so happy to finish this now.  It turned out to be one gorgeous shawl. I was wearing the shawl already few weeks ago at the Jyväskylä Knit Festivals and last weekend at my husband´s parents birthday party.

I really, really love this shawl, it´s huge, it could almost be considered as a poncho-style outfit. We photographed the shawl for a couple of hours on one windy summer day at the Hatanpää Arboretum in Tampere. Husband photographed and our daughter was a good supporter <3

My girl, me and Stella

We made a short video about the shawl, you can find it from here: