Exploring Shawl Shapes: 27 mini shawls to knit

If you want to knit a shawl, but are a little unsure your skills are up to it, this is the book for you! Filled with miniature shawl projects that take you through all the steps of a full size shawl in a tiny fraction of the time, you'll know you can conquer a human size shawl after completing the stuffed animal/large doll version. The author covers more shawl shapes than just rectangle and triangle - there are plenty of designs to choose from.

Ms. Lovick has done some wonderful books--this is not one of them. It's not terrible, but if the beginning lace knitter wants to make a small piece of lace, there are better ideas. If that knitter wants to make a doll shawl, she should pick a more challenging piece.

A good reference but I still need to work through the patterns as I think there are some errors when I just read through.

I love learning to knit shawls and these will be great for my 4 yr old granddaughter

The scale is wonderful. I can try all the design concepts before I commit to the full project.

Always enjoy Elizabeth Lovick's books. Casting on one of the patterns today.

Great little projects to practice lace knitting.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm the person who designed the layout for this book. But in all honesty this book helped me a LOT. In the process of setting all of the type for the articles and patterns I actually read the text. I mean, I had knit lacy things before this, but usually with heavier yarn and never anything more complicated than a simple lace pattern for a scarf. After working on this book I was brave enough to pick up needles and knit a lace scarf with lacy edging on each side; then I worked two triangular shawls, each having a lace edging, an inner border, and a center. I'm on a roll! The patterns are mainly smaller version of larger shawls -- enough to get a person familiar with the structure and techniques from a simple triangle to the more complex Shetland squares. (No, I haven't been brave enough to move beyond triangles, but I'm getting there!) There is one pattern for a full-sized shawl toward the end, and there are instructions in the back for enlarging most of these without making your head spin. I won't comment on the design and layout -- obviously I am biased on those aspects of the book -- but I love the content! I think this is an excellent teaching tool, and I recommend it highly.

Lovely book full of gorgeous mini apprentice shawls to build your skills but there are a number of errors in the patterns, so I would only recommend for readers who are already fairly adept at reading their knitting. Unless reprinted with errors corrected it would not be so good for beginners I'm afraid.

Loads of ideas, good section on how to make these shawls larger, nice sections on basics and good advice given - does what it says on the cover. Probably not a bad idea to get her next book out book as well as her ' the magic of Shetland Lace Knitting' books to give a fully comprehensible grasp of what Shetland shawl knitting is all about and being able to transfer some of it to other regional shawl knitting. The 'modern type' shawls of today have come from really what our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers created with yarn and needles/wires/pins.

I didn’t find a use for this book - am I missing its potential - and returned it. I thought it would help me to understand how different types of shawls are constructed, but I didn’t get that out of it. They are just little patterns for mini shawls. I couldn’t see what use these things would be after you’d made them.

Fantastic little book. It has a lot of patterns for different shawl shapes, but even more importantly it gives you the information to design your own shawls in these shapes, which is invaluable.

A brilliant introduction to Shetland Lace. Great designs that are small enough to make in a day. Also gives great advice on how to make larger more practical sized versions of each design.Elizabeth Lovick is a fantastic knitter and one of those special people that can make the most complicated patterns easy to follow through her detailed step by step instructions.