Crochet safety shawl

A curved blue crochet piece with grey accents wrapping the blue yarn. The pattern slightly resembles a fishnet.

In a world where the built urban environment is optimized for cars over people, it's super important to be as visible as possible, especially in the winter. Traditional reflective vests always looked and felt unattractive to wear, so I crocheted a cute and lightweight capelet from custom reflective yarn by Philadelphia fiber artist Emani Outterbridge. With Dublin winters being as rainy as they are, my main coat is a waterproof poncho style cut, so I needed something that would drape over the poncho without sleeves. I didn't use a pattern for this, and worked the design on the fly by counting the number of stitches for each loop, radiating outward from the center neck of the piece. On each pass around the back of the neck, I made sure to repeat the same size and pattern of loops on the other half of the capelet to keep it symmetrical.

A curved oblong with a wing extending from the top right and top left sides. The oblong appears to be glowing silver, because the yarn is wrapped with a reflective tape and the photo was taken with the lights off and the camera flash enabled, activating the reflective properties of the yarn.

A crochet piece resembling a fishnet that is shaped like a curved oblong with a wing extending from the upper right and upper left corner of the oblong. The yarn is blue with specks of grey throughout.

A detail of the bottom left corner of the shawl taken in low light with the camera flash on, causing a glowing effect.

A detail of the bottom right corner of the shawl taken in regular ambient room lighting, which causes the reflective tape wrapping the blue yarn to appear light grey.