Compose Yourself: Styling Your Shawls for Your Body

An in-person class with Laura Bellows

Nov 10, 9:00am-12:00pm PST

Let’s start with an idea! We wear clothes – including knitwear — that create visual compositions that can lead the eye of a viewer. From this perspective, every time you wear a shawl, you have a design opportunity! It should be comfortable and stable, display the knitting, and make you look great in exactly the way you want.

Laura will demonstrate design-analysis processes and a creative method to exploit specific shawl characteristics — shape, scale and dimensions, stitch pattern and color — for intentional, highly personal, compositions on your body.

Shawl designers create in two dimensions. They focus on the composition; it’s up to you to consider how it will fit your body and how you might style it. When styling a shawl in three dimensions, the pleasant process that was The Making may become a frustrating or even heartbreaking one if you can’t achieve a look and feel good wearing as you move through your days.

This is where Laura comes in: She offers examples of versatile and easy-to-style shawls as well as examples that are difficult or even unwearable. Students can then analyze their shawls and develop stylings that look great, feel great, stay stable on the body, and feature the knitting.

Finally, we will work on tailoring one of Laura’s basic shawl shapes to your body. Because this shawl was designed with you in mind, the shawl recipe is guided by several of your key measurements — around the shoulders, wingspan, and top-of-shoulder to mid-hip: simple pattern tweaks can personalize the fit for any body. You then can achieve wearable, comfortable, visually exciting, reliable looks.

Please note: All shawl-shape adjustments are appropriate for beginning knitters. If you can knit, you can knit this shawl shape so it works for you.

Special skills or knowledge needed to take this class
Knitting, purling, increasing, and decreasing

Supply list
• Pencil and paper
• Measuring tape
Optional
• If you would like to work with swatches in class, bring the relevant yarn and removable stitch markers to test rates of increase or decrease.