When I started knitting this shawl I knew I wanted to make it large as I had a whole cone of sea green cotton, so was not worried about yardage! In the back of my mind I also knew that you could not just enlarge it as usually in shawl patterns they say you can do as many reps of a part of the pattern as you like, and this one did not. I ignored that little alarm bell and gave myself a whole lot of picking back to do.
When looking online I saw someone mention that if you wanted to enlarge it you would have to go to 19 reps of the budding lace The original pattern is for 14 reps. I tried to move onto the lilly of the valley border at 23 reps without counting stitches or reading about the 19 reps first (stupid!) and it didn't work. Reading that the next step from 14 to 19 gave me an idea though. I tried again at 24 reps (this time counting stitches) and it worked! So without any more babbling here how to enlarge it. You will need a print out of the pattern to see what I'm talking about but it's free and you can get it here.
The budding lace part of your shawl must be increased in increments of 5 from the original 14 repeats e.g 14 reps, 19 reps, 24 reps, 29 reps, 34 reps and so on. I am now going to attempt to explain the maths behind this! (I'm going to be working this out for one side of the shawl only, NOT the whole shawl. I'm also NOT counting the border stitches or the centre stitch)
In the original pattern it says that at the end of the 14 reps you will have 195 sts on your needles. Take away 5 for the 4 border sts and the centre st. you have 190. 190 Divided by 2 is 95 - 95 sts for each side of the shawl. Now lets move onto row 1 of the lily of the valley border. there is a 10 st repeat and you'll need an extra 15 sts to finish it off. 95 - 15 = 80 and 80 is divisable by 10.
Moving onto the 19 rep enlargement. 19 reps of the budding lace will give you 125 sts. How did I work this out? Well, you are doing another 5 reps and the pattern states the shawl will increase by 2 sts every other row. The budding lace is made up of 3 increasing rows which will give up 6 sts increased for every rep. 5 x 6 = 30. 30 sts + the original 95 sts = 125. 125 - 15 = 110 which you can divide by 10.
Same thing for 24 reps. 125 + another 30 sts = 155. 155 - 15 = 140. And the maths goes on like this for every 5 reps of the budding lace. I hope that made sense. You can can't get the numbers to work at any point between these 5 reps unless you want to add your own stitches in somewhere, which I didn't want to do!
Once you have enlarged this part of the shawl this way you can now move gracefully onto the lily of the valley border!
Moving onto the lace border is not so simple though. You will have to add in stitches here. I tried to get it to work, but it won't. Stuff like that annoys me, but I just had to accept it! I added my extra sts in on row 1 of the lace border. This part might lose you with my awful explanation of maths but I hope it doesn't! This part is worked out for the shawl I did which was 24 reps of the budding lace and following the pattern for the lilly of the valley border, which is 2 reps of the motif.
After finishing the lily of the valley border I had 177 sts. This need to go into 8 as the next part of the shawl, the lace border, has an 8 st repeat. 177 doesn't, but 176 does. So I already have 1 extra stitch on my needles. You will increase on row 1 of the lace border chart so exact st count at this point is not nesessary as it's just a knit row. You will be increasing here so you have the correct st count for row 3 of the lace border(still following I hope!)
Now that I have the number of sts I need that are divisable 8, I still need to take into account the 7 extra sts for row 3 to make it work. 176 + 7 is 183. I need 183 sts for each side of the shawl! Now, on row 1 we do 2 yarn overs and I already have that 1 extra st, so that's 3 sts we already have to go towards that extra 7. 176 + 3 = 179. So to work out how many sts I need to increase I do a really simple subtracting sum, 183 - 179 = 4. And there we have it, I need to increase 4 stitches in row 1 of the lace border. I just spread these increases out over my knitting. Remember these are instructions for one side'half of the shawl, so you will need to put your increases in on the second side' half too.
If your not enlarging your shawl exactly how I did it, you will need to work that last bit out for yourself, but hopefully that made enough sense that you can work it our easily yourself!
You'll be glad to know that the scalloped lace edging needs no tweaking, it will just fit in, but I do recommend counting those sts just in case!!!
I hope this all made sense and helps you, I find writing out maths quite complicated!
