Burrafirth scarf complete

This is one of the patterns devised by Hazel Laurenson for Unst Heritage Trust. This pattern is steeped in ‘Unst’ for me. We love the island and are sad that because of covid -19 we have missed 2 years of visiting. Hopefully we will be able to visit soon. Hazel has devised the motifs in the pattern from ‘The west Side Shop 1880’s collection’. The pattern is available from Unst Heritage Centre and the booklet with more of these motifs in, called ‘Recreating vintage Shetland Lace’ is also available from the  Heritage Centre.(1)

The construction of the scarf  is typical Unst to me: 

Waste yarn cast on, 

knit the bottom lace edge, 

turn the right hand corner, 

pick up lace edge stitches, pick  up stitches form the waste yarn and 

turn the bottom left hand corner,

Then the first border is knit between the two vertical lace edges, so each row you actually knit 3 different lace pattern. Good for the concentration! 

After the first lace border you leave this knitting.

Start again and repeat what you have already done but this time continue for the middle of the scarf.

All that is left is to graft the two together 

Wash and dress the shawl. 

I choose to knit this one in Jamieson  and Smith Supreme 1 ply. However, I naturally dyed this yarn with Golden Rod from my garden in South Norfolk. I did not know how the quite ‘ungentle’ conditions for the natural dyeing would affect the yarn. Would it come apart? Would it felt? Well I am pleased to report that neither of these happened for me. (I do quite a lot of natural dyeing but 

even though  I had dyed the cobweb yarn form Jamieson and Smith I had not dyed this finer Shetland supreme 1 ply. After natural dyeing The NM 1/16 yarn gave me 60wpi  measured using a gauge form FLP. (2) 

I previously posted  the dyed yarn with the Harris Tweed shawl, the picture above shows the scarf with the skirt.

Those that follow my fine lace knitting will know I am a bit obsessed with grafting. So I trialled the grafting for this stole even before I decided to knit the pattern. (I discussed this in detail in a blog post here on 20 Sept 20) 

I started  knitting this scarf in Sept 20 but after I had knitted the first section I didn’t knit anymore until Feb 21. When I finished knitting the stole I decided to do trial grafts of the edging and centre again. So I knit a duplicate sample  of the full width of the scarf.  This included the  last lace edging  repeat each side and the central area which is garter stitch.

Sample with grafting of the lace edging and  garter stitch. 

Again I would like to thank Joni Coniglio for her instructions for lace grafting (3)

I found this scarf  was less nerve wracking as I had previously grafted the Hinneywaar shawl last summer and done more trials since. 

Somewhere in one of these widths of garter stitch is my graft.

Garter stitch graft

The graft of the lace edging is in here. Not quite perfect, and  I think I could improve next time with a tweak to the tension. I have enlarged it as I know I like to look at other people’s  grafts and learn from them so I am guessing this is the same for readers here.

Unusually for me I noted down how long I knitted for in each session and for the whole scarf  my total knitting time was 60 hours. Then there was the grafting, Checking, washing and dressing which would be another 7.5 hours so the total for the construction would be 67.5 hours. (This does not include the time for dyeing the yarn, sampling initially etc).

Undressed length 100cm and width 27.5cm 

Dressed length 141cm and width 31cm

Total mass 31g.

It ‘s been tricky photographing this, one doesn’t like to complain about bright sun from morning to night, but it is not good for photographs of a scarf like this. 

This gives an impression of the transparency of the scarf, but the background is very distracting. 

Hanging in the window

Looking inwards  allows the patterns to show up more. The scarf might not be very big but it packs in a good number of patterns! 

And the hand photo

...and on me, in the garden for afternoon tea, when there was a gust of breeze! 

..and my favourite photo. 

Notes

1. Unst Heritage Centre website http://www.unstheritage.com/web/
2. FLP (Fleece Loved Products) can be bought from Jellybeans Yarns on Etsy, Beaker Button on fb or contact fleecelovedproducts@gmail.com
3. Joni Coniglio’s 3 lace grafting lessons are available from Interweave, search under ‘lace knitting grafting’. There are 3 videos and an ebook in the series.