Orenburg Warm Shawl

This is an update on my previous Orenburg shawl blog entry. I was very lucky that Masha hadn’t yet taken her grandmother’s shawls home. I had a closer look at the grey shawl, which I had originally assumed was machine-knit. I wanted to check the borders to see whether they were hand-knit and I discovered that the entire shawl is a hand-knit “warm” shawl. It was carelessness on my part, but I had assumed it was machine-knit because of its very fine gauge (9 stitches = 1 inch over the garter stitch center) and exceptionally even tension in the lace sections. Also, the fuzziness of the goat hair made it difficult to see the stitches clearly and even more difficult to photograph them. Masha saw me struggling with the shawl corner in one hand, the camera in the other, holding them in front of the window so that the light would shine through the knitting, and she offered to be my extra pair of hands.

Corner detal:

The grafting, which is how Orenburg shawls are finished, is visible in the upper right. The seam at the right side of the photo shows where the shawl’s stitches were picked up from the edging but, interestingly, the side edgings were not knitted at the same time as the main body of the shawl, from end to end. The were grafted on afterwards on three sides, it appears. If you have difficulty finding the references in the photo, click the photo to go to the original Flickr page. I’ve provided notes on the photo itself.

Where the goat’s down has worn away in spots, it is possible to see the grey cotton thread that was plied with the strand of goat’s down. The border pattern is simple but qutie attractive.