The Dragonfruit Shawl features an unusual construction, three distinct sections of beautiful texture, and intricate edging. The colors and the edging, evocative of the green-tipped scales of the dragon fruit, give the piece its name.

The Dragonfruit Shawl is unusual in that the first section is worked from the bottom up, then the whole piece is turned upside down and the rest of the shawl is worked down from its underside.

The innermost section features an unexpected shaping technique for crescent shawls: differing stitch heights. The ends of the flexible slip stitch rows are capped with shells, which give a high rate of increase while keeping the section shallow. They also push the ends of the section upward so that the top edge curves nicely.

Another interesting feature of the shawl is the second and final row of the edging, which is worked in what I call a complex row: the effect of multiple rows is created by turns within the row.

Backstory:
I’ve always struggled with the fear of the blank page, or, in the case of crochet, fear of the untouched skein. So when I received my very first cake of gradient yarn, which I had ordered for the purpose of finally designing the textured crescent shawl I’d been dreaming of, I determined not to touch it until I’d first perfected the design in a less fancy yarn.

But months of swatching failed to produce anything close to what I wanted. Finally, I overcame my perfectionist side and started designing with the gradient yarn.

The design process involved lots of frogging, but along the way I realized that neither I nor the yarn was the worse for it. Designing the Dragonfruit Shawl taught me that to achieve my goals, I must stop being paralyzed by fear of mistakes.