I love lace projects, for several reasons.

1. Lace can be big and dramatic and ornate in a way that is hard to pull of in regular garments.

2. Lace accessories can be colorful without overwhelming the wearer.

3. You can wear the same lace scarf every day for a whole season without your coworkers wondering why you never do laundry.

4. Lace shawls make great gifts and you don’t need to know a person’s exact measurements to make them one.

5. Lace is super fun and engaging to knit!

6. Lace yarn is delicate and beautiful and you get a whole lotta yards in just one little ball.

All of these are reasons I love lace, and all of these reasons inspired these two new lace kits, which I spent almost a year thinking about before actually writing the patterns! The Seasons Shawls, one for Spring and Summer and one for Fall and Winter:

After I designed the Chinook Shawl for last year’s lace sampler, I got the idea to do a color-shifting shawl that would transition through the vivid, beautiful colors of the changing seasons, with lace motifs that illustrated those times of year. Instead of focusing on one color platte for the shawl, as I did with the Chinook, I wanted to design a lace shawl that would cover all the colors in the seasonal spectrum.

The fun, saturated colors of Shadow Tonal were perfect to evoke fresh rain, new grass poking up through the soil, and bright flowers in bloom for the Spring/Summer shawl. 

And the rich, deep colors of our heathery Shadow Lace yarn captured the fading leaves and darkening skies of Fall and Winter for the companion shawl.

The lace motifs in each pattern illustrate these inspirations as well. Spring/Summer, which is a lighter shawl worked in more open motifs transitions through rainfall, grass, rippling meadows with the first tiny flowers of spring, and the full blooms of summer. Fall/Winter, which is a denser, warmer knit, transitions from graceful falling leaves, through the first snow flurries, to rippling snowdrifts and angular ice formations.

Both shawls are worked with the yarn held double, so they work up fast for their size, and by switching out one strand of yarn at a time, the colors transition into each other elegantly. They are both quite large, perfect for wearing as a wrap for full dramatic effect, but since they are also lightweight, they can be scrunched up and worn around the neck as a scarf for a casual pop of color as well. All the borders are knit in as you go, and the patterns are charted for readability.

My only issue? Deciding which one to make first!