Heartland Shawl

This is Evelyn Clark's Heartland Shawl, published in the winter 2007 issue of "Wild Fibers" magazine. It was the winner in a contest for Buffalo Gold fiber. Written instructions are in the magazine and you can e-mail Buffalo Gold for the charts.

I'm a big fan of Evelyn Clark, and I normally don't riff on her patterns. But I did on this one.

• I didn't have any Buffalo Gold but I had a pile of this unidentified wool (maybe washable wool) from a thrift store. I used US7 needles with it.

• I knit seven (maybe eight, I lost count) repeats of the Bison Tracks pattern; the original called for four. One of the beauties of recent Evelyn Clark shawls is the ability to add or reduce the number of repeats and still come out with a great shawl. The shawl is 45 inches long from the center neck to the center point.
  

• All of the double decreases specified are left-leaning, which I think detracted from the pattern. So I changed some of them to right-leaning decreases. In the River of Life border, I changed the left-leaning double decreases to centered double decreases. To accommodate all of this, I recharted the pattern.

• I made the second half a mirror image of the first half instead of a straight repeat of the first half. It made a difference in only a few places but felt more symmetrical to me.

• I added a small bead at the points of the border, borrowing the idea from other Evelyn Clark shawls. I think it helps the point stay pointed a little better. And I like beads. The bead color is black diamond luster, which I think complements the turquoise (turquoise is a hard color to match, so I went for complement instead of match).

And I think the turquoise shawl and red lace-leaf maple complement nicely.