Hepatica

 At the end of the school year, I had this plan: take a couple months off from writing, start up again toward the end of July so I could have a couple things ready to publish in the fall once the weather starts to cool and seasonal knitters pick their projects back up.  But the wonderful owners of my local yarn shop (happily) foiled my plan.

They had been given 2 skeins of soon-to-be-released yarn by one of their yarn reps.  He had told them that if someone wanted to write a pattern using either of these yarns, he'd be happy to show off the sample as he travels to different yarn shops.

How could I pass up that kind of opportunity?  My master plan was a bust, but the chance to have yarn shop owners see a sample of one of my designs was way too good to pass up.  So I took both skeins of yarn home and stared at them for a few weeks.  I knew right away that the Debbie Bliss Fine Donegal yarn was going to be a lace scarf or cowl.  It has a thick-thin texture that makes it fun for accessories, but a little tricky for garments that you don't want to have any thin patches.  The little nubby bits called for a simple texture so it wouldn't compete with the texture the yarn has on its own.

I swatched a few stitch patterns from my stitch dictionaries, and ended up modifying one of them to come up with this little eyelet pattern.  The 6-hole repeat reminded me of little flowers, so I named the pattern after the flower I thought looked most similar to the lace, Hepatica (also known as Liverwort).

This is a quick and straight-forward pattern.  The pattern is written, but the lace portion is charted.  One of my testers was a complete beginner with charted lace (she had only previously attempted one lace chart and ended up frogging her project after multiple tries), and she declared this pattern simple and easy to follow.

If you can Knit, Purl, SSK, K2tog, YO and pick up stitches, you are ready for this pattern.  Additional skills that you will learn (through video demonstration links) are how to graft using Kitchener Stitch and how to provisionally cast on using a crochet hook.  (The cast-on is optional...this project could also be left un-seamed to be worn as a flat scarf if you didn't want to tackle the provisional cast-on.)

I had to mail the blue sample off to the yarn rep, but I liked it so much that I made a second sample for myself to keep out of Knit Picks Stroll Tonal in the Springtime colorway.  It's a great light-weight accessory to give you a pop of color at any time of the year!

Available now on Ravelry.