Mar 30, 20182 min read

Mystery Revealed: Zusammen

All good things come to an end, even mystery knit-alongs. It's time to reveal the Zusammen mystery shawl in all its glory. I absolutely loved seeing everyone's shawls pop up on Ravelry and Instagram — so many amazing color combinations!

The shawl starts off with an easy section that's mostly knit in the main color. Throughout the shawl decreases are placed along one edge of the shawl and increases on the other to create that asymmetrical triangle shape I love so much. The last two stitches of each row are slipped with yarn in front to create a neat i-cord edging. The section ends with three two-row stripes in the contrasting color.

In the next section you knit four short-row wedges in the contrasting color. The wedges get gradually wider and wider.

During the MKAL I got a few questions about knitting the wedges: when you start the short rows on the wrong side, do you

A. knit to the first marker you encounter on that row (left), or

B. knit to the first marker as viewed from the right side of the work (right)?

The answer is: it doesn't matter! Both ways create short row wedges, they just might look a little different compared to other people's shawls. As long as the stitch count adds up, you're good to go. By the way, I knitted them using method A: you start with the shortest short rows, then they get longer, and then shorter again.

The third section has stripes, stripes, and more stripes. First two sets of three contrast colored stripes on the main color background and then one set with the colors inverted.

This part of the shawl is the biggest in terms of stitches knit but it's also very fast and easy: pretty mindless garter stitch interspersed with sets of stripes you just can't wait to get to.

Finally, the lace border. The lace pattern with its beautiful pine cone shapes might look a bit complicated at first but there's a certain logic and rhythm to it. Once you get the set-up rows down, the rest flows pretty intuitively. If you have a lot of yarn left over, the border is a good place to make the shawl larger by doing more lace repeats (each repeat adds two rows of pine cones).

The border is worked in garter lace: yarnovers and decreases are worked on the right side and you just knit all the wrong-side rows — no purling in this shawl at all! But if you wanted to do smooth stockinette lace, the border is very easy to modify. On the wrong side, just work the i-cord stitches at each end as knits and everything in between as purls.

The shawl is finished with a picot bind-off, then blocked by pinning it out through every picot above the pine cones on the lace border.

There's still a couple of days left to enter the prize draws:

Chat away in the chatter thread on Ravelry
Share your shawl on Instagram with the hashtag #zusammenmkal, or
Post a photo of your finished shawl in the FO thread on Ravelry by March 31 at the latest.