So recently I have had an obsession with galaxy pictures. The beauty and complexity are astounding. The vivid colors are mesmerizing.
As I was making the Winter Soldier and Captain America beanies, I came up with some ideas of beautiful shawls. Among them was a Galaxy one. The others I hope to write about or start soon.
The pattern can be found here. And here is where I got my yarn. I used Knit Picks Galileo yarn for this project and it was well worth the money, but any other sport yarn would work
Materials
- 1 ball Lunar
- 1 ball Nebula
- 1 ball Quartz
- 1 ball Valentine
- Size 4 double sided knitting needles
- Size 4 round needles
- Stitch markers
For the whole shawl, I just followed the pattern. I started the shawl with Lunar on double sided needles. Lunar is a beautiful dark blue. Though not TARDIS blue it is defiantly a galaxy color. Knit until it is hard to keep all the stitches on the needles. I marked each of the 8 sections with a stitch marker to help me know where the sections begin and end.
When the stitches seem to overwhelm the 4 or 3 double sided needles, switch to round needles. Make sure to add stitch markers if you are using them.
Soon the shawl will start to grow. It doesn’t take that many rounds to increase by quite a bit.
When I was at the end of the Lunar yarn, I tied on Nebula and kept knitting. The color transition is harsh because the yarn is not variegated. However, the saturation of the colors are about the same and actually make a nice jump from one to the other.
Here is Lunar and Nebula together. Originally I was only going to make the shawl with only 2 colors, but it soon became clear that it was not enough. At this point, the shawl was about 20 inches across.
After waiting awhile to buy yarn, I finally got Quartz and Valentine. Since Quartz was the same saturation as the other too, I decided to go with that color first. As I went around the color blocks got thiner and thiner because of the growth of the shawl.
Once Quartz was finished I added Valentine. It is a brighter red. The picture below shows the difference between the two colors. Quartz was more of a dark red with a purple undertone, where as Valentine was more of a bright red.
Here it is right before I bound it off. The color blocks created an interesting transitioning shawl.
Once I was almost out of Valentine, I bound off. I had to bind the shawl super tight, which is not recommended, because I didn’t have enough yarn to bind off loose.
The next steep was to block out the shawl. I washed it with shampoo and conditioner before I left it up to dry on my shower curtain pole. Every few hours I made sure to turn it so it didn’t dry with a line in the middle of it. It’s a surprisingly effective way to dry it out.
And that was it. The shawl took a while to knit, but that was partly because I had to buy more yarn. It came out with more of a lolly-pop like appearance, but it is still majestic.
I can’t wait to see how it looks with a black dress or as a scarf.