This pair of shawls presented me with the perfect opportunity to complete my trio of shawls honoring the 21st Century Mars Rovers (the first two were Curiosity and Perseverance) Another thing that clicked into place was designing to use the special speckle colorway Miss Babs dyed for the LYS Fibre Space (they have a space theme going on)!

When looking at photos from the missions one element that struck me was the tracks stretching out behind the rovers – which I interpreted with evenly spaced long vertical stripes. These stripes are broken up with wave sections to mimic the wavy dunes the rovers had to traverse.

This pattern contains instructions to knit the shawl in either fingering or sport weight yarns. You will need two contrasting colors and if you choose a speckle (or variegated) like we did, make sure the color of your contrast is not present in the speckle.

The colorwork technique used in this shawl is a combination of slip stitch colorwork (Mosaic) and lace and it is much easier to execute than the end results might make it seem.

If you would like to see this pattern in motion and hear more about its inspiration and elements check out the Pattern Tour video on my YouTube channel Watch Barbara Knit! (will go live today at 12:30 PM EST).

This pattern is both charted and written, and the kCDesign provides a Guided Chart option (so you can see the charted and written instructions together for each row).

Get the free knitCompanion app to use your kCDesign (learn more).