Sabbat Shawls

At the moment the floor of my living room is taken over by intersecting foam mats, on which I am blocking a lace shawl. It's the shawl I've knitted for Yule, or Midwinter, as part of my project of knitting a lace shawl for each of the eight pagan sabbats in the wheel of the year, in mindfulness of the changing seasons.

I blogged the Mabon shawl here, but realise, having cast off the Yule one, that I never wrote about or posted pictures of the Samhain shawl, which I finished back in November.


For Samhain I knitted a large circular shawl, using the Lon-Dubh (blackbird) colourway of Old Maiden Aunt's merino/silk laceweight. The photos don't represent the yarn at all well, but it has these really subtle shades of an inky grey-blue, and it was perfect for a shawl that represents the death of summer, and yet the beauty and light inherent in the darkness, what the mystic writer Pseudo-Dionysus termed 'the luminous dark.' (It's a shawl that could be accused of being pretentious).


The pattern, Stor Rund Dug (which Karie informs me has the romantic Danish meaning of Big Round Table Mat), seemed to be evocative of the vortex of darkness of the triple goddess's waning, crone aspect. It is is a deceptively simple pattern, but it did take many knitting hours.


And I'm really happy with the twinkling darkness of the beads.


This time of year, in Glasgow where it feels like one can go days without seeing any sunlight, it's nice to admire this shawl (I look at it smugly and think 'I made it! Me!') and remember that the darkness is only temporary, part of a necessary cycle.

I'll write about the Yule Shawl once it's blocked and photographed!