Braided Pi Shawl

A textured half circle shawl on What’s on My Needles Wednesday

After finishing my first half pi shawl for Darn Good Yarn, I really wanted to continue playing around with this fun and simple basis for a pattern. For this week’s what’s on my needles Wednesday, I’m working on a braided Pi Shawl. But shhhh…this one is for my mom’s birthday.

Do you have someone in your life that is just obsessed with one color? My mother is hands down obsessed with beige and taupe. Its to the point where I had an aversion to these colors for the better part of my childhood. My mother was even married in a taupe dress. To be fair though, blue is my favorite color and I got married in a blue dress. So I don’t fall far from the tree apparently.

But to the wip, the Braided Pi Shawl, for what’s on my needles Wednesday!

As I said, this is a half pi shawl, which produces a half circular shape. Think half of a pie. Pi refers to the math used to plan the increases which provides the shape. I give a bit more detail on this type of shawl construction method here.

To pull it all together – I’ve got this lovely beige yarn from KnitPicks that I’m using to knit this up for my mom by June. The yarn is their Mighty Stitch. You can grab some here.

I like the Mighty Stitch yarn because its soft, which makes it both great to knit with and really nice to wear. It has a luxurious feel to it, while still being acrylic. Washing and caring for gifted items must be simple. I know my mom would take the time to air dry and block gifts, but I don’t want to force her to have to do so. It’s also garter weight or medium weight which is a nice break after working with a lot of sock and fingering weights.

The increases in a pi shawl are typically yarn overs, which create a visual element in the shawl. But they get more and more spaced out as the shawl is knit. I’m playing with evenly spaced texture to give this shawl a simple but elegant look and feel.

To keep the yarn overs evenly spaced, I’m adding rows of *Yarn Over, Knit two Together”. This enables me to keep the same pattern, without losing the shape of the shawl. I’m really happy with the way this pattern is turning out and I can’t wait to share it with all of you! I’m thinking I might give this one away for free. But we’ll see. Stick around!

Now that I’ve talked about the yarn overs, let’s talk about that beautiful braid or the stitch that runs horizontally across the shawl. Can you say horizontally if it’s not a straight line?

Here’s a quick and easy tutorial on how to create this effect in your shawl: