This shawl was born out of a challenge. I’d often admired the hand-dyed skeins of yarn that have a mini rainbow flash in an otherwise solid skein – often called zip skeins. In knitting they produce a flash of rainbow stitches.
Because each stitch in crochet wraps the yarn around itself, these flashes can be too short so I wanted to create a design that really showed off the full beauty of the yarn.

I enjoyed having a play and am thrilled with the finished shawl. It's a joy to make with a really easy, repetitive, no count pattern that's perfect for travel, knit nights or picking up and putting down again. It works up really quickly as you will always want to do one more row to see how the pops are scattering. And the finished shawl is surprisingly large for a 1 skein shawl and the shallow triangle shape makes it very wearable.

If you don’t have a zip skein this would work well with a variegated yarn choosing one colour to pop with – you’ll need a colour length of around about 15cm/6in to make it work best.

Size
Wingspan: 183cm/73in
Depth 33cm/13in
This shawl is designed to make the most of the skein and the length and depth you achieve will be affected by the length of the colour flash and how brave you are with yarn chicken!

Materials
1x 100g skein Wool Kitchen (4ply, 75% Superwash Blue Faced Leicester, 25% nylon, 100g/425m) in Nebula M2
4.5mm (US 7) hook

Tension
20 sts and 11 rows in htr to 10cm/4in using 4mm hook (or size needed to achieve tension).

Difficulty rating
Easy

Skills needed
Basic crochet stitches, working in rows, puff stitch, increasing, missing stitches.

Construction
Scarf worked in rows of increasing length until almost half the yarn is used, rows are then decreased.

This pattern is charted and written using standard UK crochet terminology (with US conversions given in the abbreviations)