Sheep to Shawl: Part VI

Part I covered washing the fleece, Part II covered prepping it, Part III covered spinning singles, and Part IV covered plying and finishing yarn. Part V covered starting to knit the shawl. There have also been two other progress reports on the shawl here and here.

The end of this project is firmly in sight now.

Current state of the shawl as of late March, with final ball of yarn above.

The plan is for the shawl to be as wide as my arms outstretched, so I have a bit more to go. I will finish off that last ball of yarn, and that should be it - I also don't plan on blocking it too much, because I like the texture. If I knit for my entire commute, I can do 5 to 6 rows (120 stitches each) a day, and each repeat of the pattern is 32 rows. There are already 11.5 repeats finished. So, if I don't get roped into doing another project, it should be finished in a few months.

I have also been working on some of the detail work. This shawl is actually a Jewish prayer shawl (tallit or tallis; pl. tallitot or tallesim). Although there are no real requirements beyond being wearable and having 4 corners to attach special fringes to, tallitot traditionally have a neck band so that a) you know which side is the front, and b) it doesn't fray as easily. 

Often these neck bands (atarah; pl. atarot) have Hebrew writing on them. The prayer you say when putting it on is a very common one - it's right there so you don't forget! But I wanted to do something a bit different. Of course, usually the writing is done with weaving or embroidery, but since I don't do those crafts, I was stuck with stranded knitting. Much slower.

I started out by creating a chart of the writing. I found a font I liked from a needlepoint site and copied the letters into my charting program. The nice thing about using the program (over graph paper) is that it will automatically resize to account for the fact that knitting stitches aren't square. The finished pattern looked like this:

The pattern (with a few mistakes)

It says "bring us in peace from the four corners of the earth," which is the phrase that you say in the morning service right before you gather the four corners of the shawl together in your hand. I did have to do some adjusting on the fly when I noticed some mistakes as I was knitting: two of the letters were out of line with the others, and the automatic resizing made some choices that I wouldn't have. 

I knit the band with blue letters on white, using the flicked, hand-dyed yarn that I have mentioned before, and the first mini-skein that I made for the shawl project (it is a bit rougher, so will have a bit of a different texture than the rest of the shawl). I also increased at each edge, to make a slanted corner, as well as put in a line of blue at the top and bottom. 

There was also another major change on the fly - I finished the bottom row of text and realized that it was plenty wide for a neck band. So I cast off. Now it just says "from the four corners of the earth," which I think is just fine. It gives it a "we're all in it together" vibe, I think.

Well, enough stalling, here's the final product:

Neck band, pre-blocking

Well, that's how it looked before blocking. Because it will be ultimately sewed onto the shawl, I wasn't too concerned with curling. And, since it was knit tightly with small needles (2.75 mm wide), it curls a lot. 

Here's a picture of it getting blocked:

Much better

 Because it is pinned to a white towel, you can really see how off-white the wool is. You can also see that the edges continue to curl a bit, but I am sure that it will go away when I sew it on. I think it came out pretty great, though maybe a variegated blue wasn't the best choice. One more picture to show the edge:

Neck band, sloping edge