Fairy Leaves Pooling Stole pattern

I have another pooling stole pattern to share with you!

To start, here's a glimpse of my process. When I'm trying to decide on how to pool a handpainted yarn, first I unwind it, and then I try to decide what order I'd like to knit up the pattern into.

This is a skein of Handgefaerbt.com's extra fine merino, in the Fairy Garden colourway. (She seems to have changed the yarn put-up since I bought this skein from her. It used to come in 575 yard, 150 gram skeins, but now they're 384 yards and 100 grams.) This pattern uses up almost the entire 575 yards of yarn, so if you want to use the same yarn, you'll have to catch it on a Ravelry destash or just buy two skeins and make a slightly longer stole.

I've doodled on the photo so you can see where I started casting on. I had two choices, both starting in the middle of the darker blue part of the skein. I could have a stole that went Blue-lime-pink-blue-pink-lime-blue, or I could go the other way, and have it be Blue-pink-lime-blue-lime-pink-blue.

I went for the former option, because I wanted the greeny-yellow colour to be closer to the edge, and not in the middle of the stole.



Fairy Leaves Pooling Stole Pattern



The pattern chart (click to make it bigger) is the Falling Leaves stitch pattern from Traditional Knitted Shawls. I've added two stitches of garter border to each edge. I thought that a leaf pattern would be a perfect complement to a colourway called "Fairy Garden."

Beginning in the appropriate place in your yarn, cast on 80 stitches using the "e" or backwards loop cast-on with a US 7 needle. Depending on your gauge, you may want to go up or down a needle size or two.

Knit 6 rows loosely in garter stitch.

A tip: Most knitters have a very different tension between their purl rows and their knit rows – my purl rows use up a lot more yarn than my knit rows, so I found myself purling tighter to maintain the pooling. To get around this, I put a US 7 needle on one end of my interchangeable needles, for my knit/lace rows, and a US 6 needle on the other end, for my purl rows. In the future, I might actually cast on and do the first few garter stitch rows with a US 8 needle, and move to a US 7/6 combination once I get to the lace pattern. Do make sure to swatch a few rows so that you know what your own gauge is, so that you're not surprised when you figure out your needle size.

Begin chart. There are two stitches for the garter stitch edging, and then two setup stitches, the 10-stitch pattern repeat, four stitches to end the pattern, and two final stitches for the garter stitch edging.

Finish with either a row 7 or a row 15.

Knit 6 rows of garter stitch. Cast off very loosely, using the sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling throughout the bindoff row.

And here's a photo of the completed stole. The final length was a little over 6 feet, and the final width was about 18 inches. (If you use two skeins of the new put-up of this yarn, that will probably be around 8 feet, or whenever you decide to stop your knitting.)