Busy Busy Busy! Knitting Knitting Knitting!

My weekend was crammed with knitting. This little blog needs to catch up!

Friday afternoon I got to pick the brain of a real, live, very experienced and very patient knitter. Over lunch chez Sel and Poivre she let me pepper her with a whole list of questions. We talked gauge and drape and the characteristics of different fibers knit with various stitches, embellishments and button placement, sizing and pattern revision. We handled swatches I'd prepared, read labels and did a fair amount of math. By the time we were on to coffee and dessert the living room looked like a knitting bomb had gone off but I felt like had my feet under me on several projects, some headed for the launch pad, others about to become FO's.

Friday evening into the wee hours and from very early, Saturday morning until dinner time, I dedicated my efforts to Tangled Yoke. (Thank you Number One Son - your social/ski calendar really came through for my knitting time!) With the charted section finally finished I got the short row shaping done en route to the neckline, the collar done and the button band complete.

I could probably have finished the sweater but I was feeling badly that I've yet to produce the mitts I promised Darling Daughter I would make for her at Christmastime.  So Saturday evening I took a break from TY and frogged the snowflake mitts. DD really wasn't loving up the cuff detail on those so why continue? Instead I cast on for a pair of Yellow Harvest Mittens from VK Fall '08 about which she is quite excited.

I've never done an I cord cuff before so that was fun and a nice departure working with the 5mm wooden dpns and worsted from the much finer 3.25 mm Addi circular and the sport weight Felted Tweed of Tangled Yoke I'd been working with all day.

Then yesterday, again up very early to send the skiers, of which I am usually one, off without me but with a hearty cooked breakfast, I took a day long class with Fiona Ellis at the DKC Winter Workshops Weekend.

The class, called "Diving into Design", focuses on the creative process of being open to inspiration, capturing that inspiration and then translating it into knitting.

Fiona has the perfect personality for such a class and a huge body of published work and design experience from which to draw.  Her class was stimulating yet relaxed and free of pressure.  I think most of us struggled at some point but by the show and tell at the end of the day everyone could hold up something that revealed they had quite successfully met her challenge to us.

Well, almost everyone...

Before I go on I should let you know that Fiona did say that sometimes, in the design process, a whole swatch may be worked only to provide a wee square of usable inspiration. How lucky everyone was in the class to have me there to demonstrate just how awful an incomplete swatch can be and yet contain a smidgen of an idea! ;). Everyone else very successfully finished amazing pieces, some of which might even well stand on their own, never mind just function as swatched concepts!

And what was that idea, that "flash of brilliance" I came up with?

I separated the plies of three colours of yarn (lavender, grey and cream) then knit one section of my embarassment swatch using a varied combination of those three. (In the photo above whole strands are in the foreground, separated ones just behind and in focus) So one section had 2 strands grey, 1 strand lavender, the next, 1 strand of each colour, the next 1 grey and 2 strands lavender which I then transitioned back to a straight lavender section.

This did yield my desired effect of having the colours kind of  "melt" into each other and surprisingly also produced a much softer hand to that section since the yarn had no twist with which to produce stitch definition - either tactile or visual.

Yes, well, whatever. Despite the size of my "breakthrough" and quality of my execution I had a very pleasant day with very pleasant knitters and at least I don't have to worry about VK or Interweave hearing of any design brilliance on my part and pestering me with requests to design for them. Phew!

Thanks for dropping by!