Plug & Play: Custom Scarves & Shawls

Class Preview

Choose and use eye-catching stitch patterns to build custom accessories that capture your style. Create your own scarves and shawls with fun, frustration-free techniques.

Intro to Plug & Play

Meet your instructor, Knitty.com founder Amy Singer, and learn more about using Amy’s plug & play technique to design scarves and shawls. You’ll be able to achieve results more quickly and easily by viewing stitch patterns as your building blocks instead of the individual stitches.

Starting Simple: Scarves With One Stitch Pattern

Begin your designing adventure with a simple, single-stitch-pattern scarf. With Amy’s guidance, you’ll seek out stitch-pattern resources, consider full and half motifs, practice building charts and calculate the gauge you’ll need for your project.

Combining Stitch Patterns

Start mixing your design up a little by adding borders, edging and a second stitch pattern to a rectangular scarf. With Amy’s explanation, you’ll find it’s not intimidating at all!

Turning the Rectangle on Its Side

Any stitch pattern can be knitted vertically or horizontally, and some look better in one direction or the other. Amy shows how knitting a scarf sideways can turn an interesting vertical stitch pattern into an exquisite horizontal one. You’ll also learn about cowl design and see how to do an easy, stretchy and attractive bind-off.

Bias-Knit Rectangles

The secret of stunning bias-knit rectangles is in the increases and decreases on the edges. Otherwise, it’s just knitting back and forth! You’ll love playing around with your stitch patterns to find ones that look fabulous on a slant. Amy also discusses yarn choices for your design projects.

Intro to Triangles

Are you ready to tackle designing a triangular shawl? If you’ve followed along with Amy so far, you’ve already learned most of the principles you’ll need! Amy covers the rate of increases to consider and how to combine multiple stitch patterns to create a stunning wrap.

Special Techniques

Amy concludes your class with a discussion of stitch patterns and copyright considerations, an overview of yarns and fibers you might use in your designs, a look at some decorative touches (including how to use a fringe twister!) and a reminder to block for a beautifully finished scarf or shawl that showcases your design.