This time I will be talking about another shawl-to-garment transformation. I find these kind of transformations quite fun to work on. It’s almost impossible to know where they will end up when I first start working on them.
First, let’s take a look at the original piece. Here we have a triangle shawl worked in a leaf-like lace pattern. The yarn is a DK weight cotton, linen, viscose blend yarn. The yarn is self-striping, creating wide gradient-like bands of color. The resulting fabric has great stitch definition, shine and drape.
The first idea I had was to try some pleating techniques on the fabric. Using the leaf-like pattern, I used removable stitch markers to fold the fabric across several points. I quickly realised that this approach would not work. The resulting fabric looked too crowded: the colors didn’t like up nicely anymore and the stitch pattern completely disappeared. Furthermore, pleating across the entire surface meant that I would just end up with a smaller size triangle shawl. It would be difficult to do anything else with it.
So I removed the temporary pleats and draped the shawl over my body form. I played around for a while until I settled on the final configuration. That’s when I noticed that the size of the shawl was enough to make an asymmetrical summer top.
To achieve this, all I needed to do fold and seam twice. In the picture below you can see how the piece is folded and where each seam is located (the seams are marked with removable stitch markers).
I found a matching yellow-green thin linen yarn in the leftovers stash and used it to do the seams. I worked a single crochet seam for seam strength, but also to make it easy to re-do the seams in case they didn’t work. Once the seams were completed, I worked a simple single crochet border around the neck and sleeve opening.
The final piece features one sleeve opening, a wide neck opening and a sideways triangle front opening. It sits well on the shoulders and is comfortable to move in, without any movement restrictions. It looks super cool on.
This modification turned out awesome and I am surprised by the result! An enjoyable process: the final piece gives me a lot of ideas and inspiration for new knitting and crochet top designs.
I am looking forward to sketching and swatching of inspired new designs. 🙂
The Asymmetric Linen Top is now available for purchase in my shop.
