Pooling Streams Stole pattern

I finished this pooling stole last night, and I love love love it! There's an amazing match of the colour of the yarn and the pattern repeat, which is making me think that I really need to swatch out my future yarns and then match the pattern to the yarn colours as they pool.

I've gotten so many wonderful comments about this stole on Ravelry already that I'm rushing the pattern into "print"!


Pooling Streams Stole Pattern
Yarn: Wollmeise 100% superwash, in the Tants colourway.
Pattern: Japanese Feather, from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury.


Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 86 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Begin chart as pictured below. Row number 1 is the back side.

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.

Please note that I haven't charted the odd-numbered rows, to save space. All odd-numbered rows are the same as Row 1.

The pattern repeat is all of the stitches between the ones highlighted in yellow, except for the final pattern repeat, where you omit the stitch that's highlighted in blue. Don't forget that the edge stitches are garter stitch, so when you knit the back, the first and final five stitches are always knit, not purl.

End with a Row 4 or a Row 18.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.

And here's a close-up of the stole!


As I was knitting up the stole, I debated a few pattern modifications, as I've charted below. One of the really nice things about this stole pattern is the zig-zagging movement of the yarn, and the purl stitch at the edge of the pattern repeat serves to strongly accentuate that shape. You could double that purl stitch and remove edging stitches, as I've charted below.

Also, if you don't like the strong horizontal bar which separates the zig and the zag sections of the stole, you could omit rows 4-5 and 18-19, I've marked "optional" in the chart below.