May 13, 2026

The Shawl Collector

On the shawls I make, the shawls I keep, and the woman I keep imagining I’ll become

There is a large blue IKEA bag at the bottom of my closet. You know the one, the kind you use to haul your college kid’s belongings into a dorm room and then repurpose forever after for things you’re not sure what to do with. One of mine contains shawls. Many shawls. Shawls I made with my own hands, in fingering weight yarn, over many months, with great intention and considerable love. I do not wear them; this requires some explanation.

I am a shawl knitter. Not a shawlette person, I want to be clear about that. I have no interest in a decorative neck scarf masquerading as a shawl. When I make a shawl, I mean it. I mean wingspan. I mean something that wraps around me completely, twice, possibly three times, the kind of shawl that functions less as an accessory and more as a personal climate system.

In knitting a shawl, I allow myself a little more freedom with color than I do anywhere else. My garments tend toward the safe and the muted, the earth tones, the soft neutrals, the palette of someone who has strong opinions about beige. But a shawl loosens something in me. Fades and variegated yarns that shift and surprise across hundreds of yards fly off my needles. The occasional shawl that reads, from across a room, as genuinely joyful.

There was a time when I wore all of these. I worked at a yarn shop, and I wore my shawls the way some people wear a name tag as an immediate declaration of who I was. A different shawl every day, draped and pinned and arranged with the casual confidence of someone who had thought about this more than she would admit. Those were the shawl years. They were good years.

Then I went back to working in an office. And somehow, between the commute and the desk and the particular social physics of a professional environment, the shawls stopped coming with me. I told myself it was practical. I told myself I’d get back to it. And then I knit the Friday Shrug, a tube, no sleeves, that you arrange on your shoulders just so and it looks like you’ve never once had to think about what you’re wearing. And that, apparently, was that. I knit several more after it and I love them still. After months of sitting on my closet shelf, sadly the shawls went into the bag.

I still think about knitting them, though. There’s something about having a large shawl on the needles that functions as ballast for me. The same comfort that sock knitters seem to find in always having a pair on their needles, at any given moment, without exception. A shawl on the needles is a project with stakes, with shape, with a trajectory. It asks something of me. I find that steadying. It’s the finished object I seem to have trouble with.

I take them out sometimes. I unfold them and hold them up and put them on and look at myself in the mirror. They’re beautiful, I know they are. But they feel, if I’m being honest, like artifacts of a slightly earlier self. The variegated colorways that I loved so much have begun to read as distinctly of their moment. I think about making a new one, something in a solid or maybe something tonal and more in line with who I am now. I think about how stunning it could be, stylish and sophisticated. I conjure her up, that woman. The one gliding across the room at a dinner party, shawl arranged just so. You know exactly who she is. As do I, and she is not me. And yet, I’ve been eyeing a rather beautiful skein of tonal fingering in a deep, smoky gray. Very her. I’ve already started winding it. The bag has room.

Find the yarn for your next shawl at Pearl & Clover.