Isager Tokyo Shawl: A Year of Colour Coming Together
I cast on the Tokyo Shawl designed by Marianne Isager, and as the first forty centimetres grow beneath my hands, I watch a year of colour return to me. Each row holds a moment from the dye pot, a season on the calendar, a slow ritual repeated across the months. The shawl isn’t simply a project; it is the quiet accumulation of a year spent working with natural colour.
Two threads move together throughout the piece:
• a hand-spun singles wool, soft and lightly textured, coloured in small seasonal batches, and
• a cobweb-fine silk mohair, dyed alongside it so the tones meet and breathe as one.
The fabric forming between the needles is airy, radiant, and finely balanced - light, but with a calm depth.
The Colours So Far
This shawl gathers many of the natural dye I’ve worked with this year:
Natural brown blended wool - prepared on the hackle, where undyed brown met deeper plant-dyed tones. The resulting yarn holds a grounded, earthy complexity that threads through the shawl in subtle intervals.
Avocado pink - a subdued, tender blush created from simmered avocado skins. On mohair it drifts toward an antique rose; on wool it rests as a quiet, dusty pink. It feels intimate and understated.
Indigo - two depths: one a mid-blue reminiscent of worn denim, the other a deeper, velvety blue that stops just short of midnight. These tones came from my March indigo work, and on mohair they soften into something almost misted.
Onion-skin gold - an amber tone born from winter cooking, dyed in a bowl balanced over the fireplace. The yarn picked up soft, irregular shifts in colour, like the warmth of a late afternoon. It brings a gentle glow to the fabric.
Kariyasu yellow - a clear, bright botanical yellow from Japanese miscanthus grass. It carries a crisp, almost citrus clarity. In August I dyed both wool and mohair together, and the harmony between the fibres still holds beautifully here.
Leftover yarn from the It’s Not a Sweatshirt jumper - a single-ply strand that brings a familiar texture into the mix, a small echo from winter knitting carried forward into this piece.
How It’s Knitting Up
The pairing of hand-spun wool with fine mohair softens every colour. Yellow becomes diffused light. Pink appears and recedes delicately. Indigo settles beneath a pale, luminous halo. The resulting fabric is open and feather-soft, yet quietly warm.
Colour shifts are gentle, and even at this early stage, a subtle rhythm is emerging, one tone dissolving into the next. The shawl feels like it is unfolding at its own pace.
Why I’m Writing This Now
I wanted to mark this moment while the early transitions are still visible, before the finished piece gathers everything into a single, seamless impression. Each dye carries its own small story, winter fires, household scraps, Japanese plants, and this shawl is where they meet.
Here are links to the earlier dyeing posts now shaping into a shawl that holds a year’s worth of colour.
Avocado Pink and Kariyasu Yellow
Onion & Avocado: Colours from Scraps
Grey: My Favourite Winter Jersey
