Attuned

Rebecca

Dec 28

After yesterday's one-week impulse project, the other finished project I have to share with you was a long-term project! Very long-term, as it turns out. The story of this item begins in 2010, when I was working for a yarn shop in Maryland called Cloverhill Yarns. The shop had a prime booth at the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival, and the owner at the time had a practice of bringing in yarn and fiber from smaller makers on consignment. It was a great deal for us workers; we got first pick of some gorgeous stuff usually only available online.

I was a very new spinner at the time, and this was the festival where I really fell down the hole of stash acquisition. I think I finally used all that stuff up a couple years ago. Anyway, one particularly treasured item was this set of three braids:

I had always wanted to spin them as a gradient, but like so much of my stash from that time period they sat, sat, and sat. I almost sold them a couple of times. But after I took up spinning in a serious way, and connected to the Wool n' Spinning community, I spun them up for my first active Tour de Fleece in 2017.

I actually spun them on my tiny castle wheel. They were a real lesson in consistent short-forward spinning, and I grew a great deal through this project. I even made a vlog about it, when I was playing at having my own show - too much work, as it turned out, but I learned a lot through those videos, and it's nice to have the record.

I made a gradient by dividing the braids so they would change at a staggered rate. It worked brilliantly, and I had about 800 yards of 3-ply DK weight in the end. Gorgeous stuff.

Then it sat. For six more years.

The right time, the right project, just never came around. I wanted to use the gradient, but doing so in a sweater is tricky. And there were always other things to make.

Enter the Attune Shawl SPAKAL (spin-along-knit-along. Sometimes abbreviated SALKAL). Andrea Mowry + Rachel Smith in a spinning and knitting event that started with Tour de Fleece 2023, and officially wrapped up in September, but plenty of folks are still knitting (including Rachel).

I spun a whole shawl quantity for the Attune shawl during TdF. It was a whole thing. You can read all about it.

But after spinning just one skein of the stuff, I made a hard pivot. There was no way this could be Attune. It needed to be a sweater. I decided to use my handspun gradient instead. I left on vacation with the first skein in hand, purchased a nice basic 100% wool at Cloverhill Yarns (how's that for full circle?) and cast on.

I chose a grey that had an overall similar value to the handspun. My reasoning: the handspun is very bright, rather brighter and more cheerful than I am usually comfortable wearing. White or black would have made the colours pop more, but the grey toned it down just right.

I knit this shawl all over the place on vacation, but once I got home, I worked on it in spurts. Mostly when I was in between hexies and designs, waiting for one thing and another, I'd put a week of hard hours into it and see some real progress. When the yarn was halfway used up, I switched to garter stitch, rather later than recommended in the pattern.

You know, I thought I was going to find this project really tedious once the rows got really long, but I got into a real groove with it. You change colours every row, which means working along the right side twice, then along the wrong side twice. This broke the work into chunks. This continued to be the case in the garter stitch section, which I thought I would hate - garter stitch with purling just seems like making unpleasantness for oneself. But again, the work was chunked. Knit RS, Purl RS, Purl WS, K WS, and you feel like you've accomplished something when there's hundreds of stitches on the needle. And it's really only the idea of purling that I find unpleasant; I'm just a titch slower at purling, and it's sure faster than brioche.

I realized when I started the last ball of handspun that if I kept going, this thing would be truly unweildy in size. I would already be sitting on it if I wore it around my back - you can see it swallowing my new blocking mats. So I cut my losses. I didn't even look at the pattern, I just decided an i-cord bind-off would suit. And wouldn't you know, a run of pink perfectly frames the shawl's point. Slam dunk! After such a grand effort, I can live with a little over half a ball going into the handspun leftovers stash.

One decision I'm so happy I made: to start with green. There's much less green and blue than orange-yellow in the handspun, so putting the lesser colour in the center makes it so much more dominant than it would be at the edges. It looks better next to my face, and it makes me happy.

Many people have noted that they like the brioche side of the textured section better than the fisherman's rib side, and they don't love the fact that the fisherman's rib side grows at twice the rate. It is prettier, I agree. But I don't mind, because of the aforementioned rest rows. Every time I knit that part in grey, it was straight knitting. I appreciated that! And with how I wear it, the brioche gets just as much visibility as the fisherman's rib.

So how do you wear such an enormous thing? I'm sure there are lots of ways, but here's what's working for me right now.

The longer triangle, the fisherman's rib side, goes over the shoulder and around the back, then over the other shoulder. Then the brioche side goes over just one shoulder.

This roughly centers the point, and you can easily add a shawl pin to the shoulder where both ends cross.

I feel so Andrea Mowry wearing this. Her Attune shawl has become iconic in the knitting world, like so many of her patterns.

To be honest, I won't wear a giant pile of fabric like this all the time. I'll throw it on when I want to look knitterly and cool, and when I need all that extra warmth. (Like right now, in my office, eating a salad in December in the Arctic.) I'm so glad to have participated in the Wool n' Spinning + Drea Renee Knits #spintoknitattune spakal, and to even have finished the shawl by the end of the year!

I don't actually know why Andrea named the shawl Attune. It seems a funny name for a design so dominated by asymmetry. But the knitting followed me through a time when being attuned to my life meant being relatively out of tune with my spirit. And now that I'm in a season of getting attuned to myself again, I'm glad to be wearing it.