Slippery Slope
A few months back, my Slippery Slope pattern debuted in Knotions Magazine. I know a number of you admired it there and were inspired to cast on your own. Some of you have also been knitting yours during the Super Summer Shawlalong.
But for those of you who missed seeing it when it first came out, I’d like to draw your attention to this shawl. I think it’s worth noting for a few different reasons.
First, unlike most of my other shawls (and much of what seems to be out there right now in the shawl-knitting world), it’s not made from fingering-weight yarn. Instead, it uses worsted, which means it’s both warmer and a fair bit quicker to knit. I know it’s hard to contemplate winter when we’re in the home stretch of summer, but as Ned Stark says… it’s coming.
The other thing that’s a little bit unusual about this shawl is the yarn choice. I paired two yarns together that you don’t often see in the same project: one a big-box, craft-store yarn: Red Heart Boutique Unforgettable, the other a premium yarn: Malabrigo Worsted. That choice was made mindfully, if a bit whimsically. You see, the Boutique Unforgettable was the heart of the project. I loved its long color changes and saturated colors and wanted to create a shawl that would really allow it to shine — to be the decorative icing on top of a delicious cake. So I planned for it to be displayed it in a series of highlight rows, elongated stitches, and eyelet chains on a background of… something… that would allow it to be the star of the show.
But what would the ideal something be for the background? I didn’t want to use another acrylic yarn. Acrylic has its uses, and it’s used to advantage in Unforgettable, but it also has its drawbacks. This particular iteration of acrylic is a bit slippery, and its construction (a singles) can exacerbate its tendency to move around. So using a solid or semi-solid version of the same yarn was right out. I needed a background yarn that would bring solidity and a bit of structure to the party.
I also wanted a yarn that would bring coziness to my shawl. If I’m going to knit up a worsted-weight shawl to cuddle up with in the winter, I want it to feel, frankly, cuddly. And that led me to one of my consistent go-to yarn companies for softness: Malabrigo.
Malabrigo Worsted is, like Unforgettable, a singles yarn, but where Unforgettable is slick, Worsted has the lover-loving grip of non-superwash wool. It creates a stable base for the Unforgettable to play across, and it does it in that squishy, wonderful Malabrigo style that I just can’t get enough of. This yarn is like buttah in the hands and that, friends, is a yarn quality I enjoy.
It’s also a pretty good, though not exact, match to the actual size of Unforgettable. Malabrigo Worsted is just slightly heftier, but the design takes that into account. This isn’t stranded colorwork, where your stitches need to be the same size. The shawl was designed to allow the flexibility of working with two yarns of ever-so-slightly different grist; in fact, when swatching for gauge I specifically ask you only to get gauge in your main color/background yarn. You’ll use the needles that give you that gauge for the whole project, and whatever gauge your highlight yarn gets on those needles will be just fine.
“But, but… what about blocking and washing?” you ask. “Those are very different fibers!” Yes, they certainly are. And using yarns of different fibers in a project could certainly invite havoc. But of course I’ve tested this for you (and for myself, frankly). I swatched, I measured, I washed, I measured again. And so should you, always.* When hand-washed and laid out gently to dry, these two yarns behaved beautifully together. That’s due in some part to the hand-washing but also partly to the design itself.
That means if you’ve already got a special, precious skein of your own that you’d like to show off — whether it’s a long color-change yarn like Noro Kureyon or a delicious hand-dyed self-striper or variegated skein — you can pair in this shawl it with a solid or semi-solid yarn that’s a “close enough” match in yarn weight. You don’t need another skein of the exact same yarn.
And it also means if you want to make this shawl on a budget, that’s pretty easy, too. The yarns called for aren’t particularly pricey — even the Malabrigo is on the more-accessible end of very nice yarn — but you can work pretty easily with whatever worsted-weight yarn you choose.
If you’re inspired to cast on, the pattern is available here on Ravelry and here on my Payhip shop. I can’t wait to see what you make!
* If you’re a staunch anti-swatcher, never fear. This shawl starts small and grows as you go, so go ahead and cast on, work through the first 30 or 40 rows, slip the stitches onto something that can get wet, and test-block that swatch. As long as everything’s working out, you can continue knitting, and if there’s a problem that requires adjustment, you haven’t done any more knitting than a regular old swatch would have been.
