Baikal Bubbles

• Yarn - Stitch Sprouts Crater Lake
• Yarn Weight - Bulky
• Yardage - 220 yards (201 m)
• Needles - US 11 - 8.0 mm
• Size - 16" X 53" (40.5 X 135 cm)
• Language - English

Bulky yarn is awesome. It is fast to knit and provides almost instant gratification. But it is, well, bulky and it can be a challenge to find patterns that will allow me to indulge in my love of bulky yarns all year round. That is where lace comes in! Combining the openwork of lace with larger yarns yields bold, graphic designs with big impact.

To create the oversized holes in this shawl I use a bit of lace magic. On one row I have double decreases separated with double yarn overs, resulting in some missing stitches. But the stitches come back when you work four stitches into that double yarn over on the return row. This balances out the stitch count and creates a supersized hole!

Lake Baikal is an enormous freshwater lake in Sibera that is amazingly clear. If you search online for photographs you will find stunning shots of methane bubbles frozen in the several feet of ice that forms during the winter months. I thought that the columns of lace in this shawl echoed the columns of bubbles in these photos and that provided the inspiration for its name.

This pattern can be worked entirely from the written instructions or utilizing the provided charts.

Stitches Used: k, kfb, k2tog, p, s-wyif, ssk, ssk-pssf-s1(can substitute k3tog), s1-k2tog-psso, YO