Some days, only fine lace will do. On those days, when your soul feels tender and you’re quieter than usual, Veela is the shawl you’ll reach for.

Knitted from side to side in fine lace-weight yarn, Veela is a soft, elegant, stole that’ll almost knit herself. She’s irresistible to knit, and as the twists and turns in her lace are unveiled, you’ll be tempted to just knit another row, and another … and another.

Veela requires approx. 1093 yds/1000 m of lace-weight yarn but not all 100g lace-weight skeins are that long, some are around 875yds/800 m of delicious-lusciousness … but that’s not quite enough – or is it?

Happily, it just might be.

The lovely thing about Veela is that she’s worked in repeats. That means, she repeats a pretty stitch pattern over, and over, across her rows, as well along her body.

When you knit Veela, you’ll begin with edge stitches, and then repeat a bunch of stitches to create the pretty lace pattern across the row. (Top tip: use stitch markers to separate your repeats … you’ll notice any boo boo’s straight away!).

The whole lace repeat takes a handful of rows to complete, and that handful of rows are worked again and again, to create the flowing pattern through Veela’s body.

USING A BIT MORE, OR A BIT LESS YARN

If you have a little less yarn than required, you may decide to leave out one of the lace repeats and make your Veela a little narrower.

Start by casting on the number of stitches required for the repeats you intend to include (perhaps all but one or two), plus the edge stitches on either side … and away you go! Work the border as written, and then move on to the body.

If you have a super-long skein of yarn, perhaps cast on more stitches, and add another repeat or two across the row to make Veela wider. You could also repeat the handful of rows that make up Veela’s lace pattern a few more times to make her longer through the body.

USING ALL THE YARN YOU’VE GOT

If you’ve super-keen, you could make the most of the yarn you’ve got by working to weight.

You could do this instead of adding or taking out a lace repeat, or as well as adding or taking out a lace repeat.

• Weigh your skein before you start and make a note of how heavy it is.
• Looking at the sketch of Veela above, you’ll see that she has a lace “fringe” at either end, each the same length as the other, and a proportionally longer lace section in between.
• Let’s say your skein weighs 100g. You could use 40% of your shawl for both the lace fringes (20% each), and then use the remaining yarn for the body section. To do that, work the fringe at the beginning of the shawl until your skein weighs 80g (100g – 20g = 80g).
• If you’d prefer a shorter fringe and a longer body, use less, a longer fringe, use more. You could even eyeball it and decide as you go, if that’s how you like to roll. Just keep a note of how many rows you worked for the fringe.
• When you’ve got a little over 20g of yarn (or just a teeny bit over the weight you used for the first fringe) AND you’ve finished the last row of the repeat, start getting to work on the last couple of lace rows and then the fringe at the other end.
• Work exactly the same number of rows for the final fringe and bind off.

Voila! You’ll hopefully find that all that weighing and counting will use every last inch of yarn in your skein!

You can find Veela here. Happy knitting!