Hello everyone! It’s so hard to believe that the end of August is already here, summer has blown by so quickly. Already the edges of the leaves are burnished, and there are more leaves on the ground in the parks than I can remember typically seeing at the end of August. I’m not ready to let go of summer just yet, even though it is officially September at the end of the week, and Lila starts Senior Kindergarten next week. That rushing sound that you just heard? The month of August, whizzing right by.

But I’m back! I must confess it felt so good to take the summer off. My finger seems to be mostly healed up, I’ve got some finished knits to share, and Knitted Bliss is back in full swing. Which means…. Modification Monday! And I think you are going to love this Mod:

Original Pattern: Anonymous Shawl 

Knitter Extraordinaire: Jennifer (Ravelry ID, blog)

Mods: Changed the yarn weight from DK to fingering weight, and adjusted the single-colour shawl pattern to use 3 colours. Details can be found on her project page here, and her blog post about the shawl, here.

What Makes This Awesome: It can be challenging to combine colours when the original pattern is a solid colour and doesn’t offer any ideas on how (or where!) to change colours. But Jennifer pulls off the colour changes beautifully! She started with a palette of three colours that looked great together, which featured two tonal yarns and one more variegated yarn.  Combining the dark red and black yarns into a striping section has a wonderfully rich subtlety to it, and allows the more variegated yarn to simultaneously stand out, and pull all there colourways together. The result is stunning! For your own knitting, think about some of the skeins in your stash that might look beautiful together. Then take a look at patterns that might be a good fit, even if they don’t call for more than one colour. Are there interesting ways you could combine your skeins in the pattern, and make something completely new?