Lodestone

This shawl combines a lot of elements that remind me of my dear mother Barbara Walker. Not the legendary Barbara G. Walker of stitch dictionary fame, but Barbara S. Walker of somewhat lesser ceramic fame. Also of an artistic nature, my Barbara Walker loved to wrap various types of string and twine around wooden paddles that she would slap against moist clay to create texture in pots of all shapes and sizes. The stitch patterns in this shawl remind me of some of those textures.

It’s only fitting that I choose two of those stitch patterns (Daisy Stitch and Indian Cross Stitch) from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara G. Walker, a book that my mother gifted me when I worked in a yarn store in the early 1980s. To top it all off, the blue of this yarn matches my mother’s beautiful blue eyes and I named the pattern for the former co-op gallery in Boulder, Colorado, of which my mother was a member and where she sold her pottery. Here’s to you, Mom!