Yesterday, I went over the Fall Berries Shawl pattern and how it looks knit up using Red Heart’s Hopscotch yarn, I wanted to talk about the pitfalls I fell into while working on it. The stitches are not difficult, but the order in which you do the stitches is very important.

My general thoughts about this pattern include the suggestion to print it out. I was working on it from my phone with no real way to keep track of where I was. This would be a mistake. I ended up doing an extra row just before the pattern changed and had to go back and rip it out. It’s very easy to get into a groove and just keep working. While the pattern may not look like it changed a whole lot, it does change a little bit and it’s very important to observe the changes happening in the pattern.

While I did go back and rip out that one row, I ended up leaving an other couple of mistakes I made.

My photo above is an excellent visual for what this mistake looks like when I started knitting the stitches in the wrong order. In the bramble stitch, the pattern says to alternate between a decrease then an increase and an increase then a decrease every other RS row. I started doing it backwards which led to the edge being perfectly flat.

While some people may like this design aspect, I was actually trying to knit it as per the pattern!

So printing out the pattern and keeping score of the rows and pattern stitches is the best way to trouble-free knitting…

As you can see from the photo above, Hopscotch yarn makes this little webbed effect down the side as you’re knitting the pattern. It then changes to a straight line. If you start doing the pattern out of order, you’re going to get a different effect altogether.

The Fall Berries Shawl pattern is plainly and clearly written, but it’s always worth your time to print out the pattern, read it over first, and pay close attention when you’re actually knitting it.