Month: July 2016

This is week 10 of the pattern highlights from my upcoming book. If you like what you’re reading about, please join my preorder mailing list. To read more about why I’m doing this (and why you should join the list), you can visit the Month 5 blog post.

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Atyria II is worked in Seven Sisters Arts Helix, a fingering weight BFL.

My original idea for a Craftsy class involved teaching the basics in one pattern, then cramming as many techniques into a second pattern as physically possible. I wanted to try to get a whole book’s worth of techniques into that class. In retrospect, I’m lucky that Craftsy talked me down from that ridiculous goal. Whatever I made would have been hideous, and probably wouldn’t have sold the class as well as the two patterns I ended up using instead. Atyria was a pattern that used my off-the-grid style of decorative increases and decreases, combined with some basic 1×1 double-knit cables. This was the first place my new double-knit cable techniques were taught on a grand scale. However, the pattern was a bit of a rush job and I knew it. It was a great way to teach the techniques but a poor execution of a pattern. It relied on an obscure technique I called “ghost pairs” which confused some people greatly, and in the end the hat was too short and there was no good way to lengthen it. When I realized that the class was past its second birthday, I checked my contract and realized that the patterns were my property again, so I redesigned Atyria, lengthened the pattern and removed the ghost pairs. If you’re already in my Craftsy class, this pattern will be separated from the book and offered as a free download for my Craftsy students, around the same time as the book comes out.

I also took the opportunity to change the yarn I was working in. While I enjoyed working in Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sport for Craftsy, it was a superwash yarn and I wanted to steer away from that when possible. I stumbled across a sportweight BFL in a New York City shop and figured I’d use that instead. The dyer (who shall remain nameless) was excited that I was going to be working in her yarn for one of my book’s projects, but when I reached out to her for yarn support (the colors I had bought weren’t quite what I needed), she never answered. I poked her again a little while later but my time was getting short so I had to choose another yarn. I heard from some other designers that the same thing had happened to them — I hope she’s OK. Her blog seems to indicate she is, but there’s a month-long gap in the posts right around when this happened. Anyway, I ended up finding Seven Sisters Arts, a company from Maine, at Stitches West of all places — and they not only had a heavy fingering BFL, they had it in almost exactly the same colors I originally used for Atyria. It turns out the owner is a big fan and was flattered that I’d be working with her yarn. I finished the hat in record time and was able to show her the final version at Stitches South later that year.

Atyria, if you google it, is a genus of moth. While that’s a dirty word to knitters, the vast majority of moths are not likely to eat your yarn stash and many of them are quite pretty. The spiral motifs in this hat, while clearly meant to represent some kind of fern-like plant, reminded me of moth antennae or probosces, so I looked for a moth-related name. Atyria is a pretty name and more easily pronounceable than something that ends in -ae, even if moths in that genus don’t actually seem to have any particular relationship to the spiral shape.

This pattern will be available in my upcoming book “Double Or Nothing”. To be informed when the preorder period begins, please join my preorder mailing list. Thanks!

This is week 9 of the pattern highlights from my upcoming book. If you like what you’re reading about, please join my preorder mailing list. To read more about why I’m doing this (and why you should join the list), you can visit the Month 5 blog post.

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Ferronnerie is worked in Quince & Co Finch, a fingering weight wool.

This is one of those patterns that will probably require an entire chapter of techniques to support it. Like many colorworkers before me, I played a bit with entrelac to better understand this fascinating basketweave-like fabric, but honestly never liked the messy “wrong side” of the work with all its exposed seams. It seemed to me that it was ripe for the double-knit treatment, but there was a lot of problem-solving that needed to be done before I could proceed. After experimenting with a few swatches, I began to understand something critical: double-knitting and entrelac are made for each other! There are all kinds of ways that the two techniques just fall naturally together. I’d go into more detail here but I don’t want to give everything away. I do want to point out one thing here, though. If you’ve ever done entrelac in the round in multiple colors, you know that you do a round of diamonds in each color so you get concentric rounds of diamonds. But if you look at this pattern, you’ll notice that the color changes are radial, not concentric. The hat is still worked concentrically, though. This is a trick that I can achieve because I’m doing it in double-knitting — and I’ll explain it in the book for those who haven’t yet figured it out.

The yarn I’m using here is from Quince & Co, which is super popular lately; when I first stumbled across them at a shop in Maine, the patterns they had were, by and large, done in a single colorway. This seemed a shame to me since they have so many colors and good weights of yarn for colorwork. Since then, their colorwork patterns have perhaps not exploded, but many other designers have seen the possibilities and there are now plenty of colorwork patterns available — not to mention all the patterns originally worked in something else that people have decided to use Quince for instead. Still, I love their yarn and particularly the stitch definition in Finch; I wanted to showcase it with something really stunning, so it was a shoo-in for double-knit entrelac.

The term “entrelac” is derived from a French word for “interlacing” which describes what the fabric looks like when finished, especially in single-sided versions. Double-knitting it sort of flattens the fabric out a bit but the interlaced look is not diminished completely. Because the technique is named in French, I looked for a French word for the pattern’s name. The chart I’d chosen for the colorwork parts is based on a common wrought-iron shape, so I found a term “ferronnerie d’art” which refers to wrought-ironwork. “Ferronnerie” evidently just means “ironwork” — which, since it’s worked in wool, calls to mind another play on words: irony.

This pattern will be available in my upcoming book “Double Or Nothing”. To be informed when the preorder period begins, please join my preorder mailing list. Thanks!

This is week 8 of the pattern highlights from my upcoming book. If you like what you’re reading about, please join my preorder mailing list. To read more about why I’m doing this (and why you should join the list), you can visit the Month 5 blog post.

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Eureka is worked in A Hundred Ravens Aesir, an 8-ply sport/DK superwash merino yarn.

To put a cap (pun intended) on the textured double-knitting in this book, I decided to cram all the techniques I still wanted to teach into one pattern. As is typical for me, I loaded all the techniques into a very small space and designed a hat with them. I love hats — they’re a great way to try out and learn a technique (or techniques) without resigning yourself to a massive project. You don’t need to knit a sweater in order to learn RDK decreases or quilted DK. Sure, both techniques could come in handy in a sweater, but why not just do a hat? The sweater can come later. This hat is made up of triangles; all of the inverted triangles are done in purls. However, you may remember from elementary double-knitting that the fabric may only be held together by color changes within a row. When two large triangle bases meet horizontally, as happens frequently in this hat, what you really get is a big hollow diamond. In order to stabilize the fabric, I had to use a horizontal linking method. Lucy Neatby and I independently developed our own methods of doing this technique, so we talked and decided to be consistent with the name: quilted double-knitting.

I first encountered A Hundred Ravens at a local sheep & wool show; a good friend and sample knitter of mine was staffing the booth and lured me in with soft yarn and vibrant colorways (as you probably understand). While I have lately been trying to avoid superwash merino, the base is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to avoid it completely. And sometimes it’s worth it. AHR is another local yarn company, like Dirty Water Dyeworks back in the first post, that I’ve had the pleasure of watching grow from a local to a regional and perhaps even national brand. They’re still small, but they’ve got great colorways and are well worth checking out. The yarn I chose for this hat, Aesir, may be a superwash merino, but it’s an 8-ply sport/DK which has an unusual look and great stitch definition.

The original name for this hat was going to be “Achtung” but when I showed it to my local guild (while Kate from AHR was presenting, no less!), someone noticed the exclamation point on the front and called it a “thinking cap” — so the name “Eureka” was born. There is a second version called “Eureka?” that has question marks instead of exclamation points (worked in two-pattern DK, of course) for those who are less confident about their discoveries.

This pattern will be available in my upcoming book “Double Or Nothing”. To be informed when the preorder period begins, please join my preorder mailing list. Thanks!

This is week 7 of the pattern highlights from my upcoming book. If you like what you’re reading about, please join my preorder mailing list. To read more about why I’m doing this (and why you should join the list), you can visit the Month 5 blog post.

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Hexworth is worked in Bijou Basin Ranch Tibetan Dream, a yak and nylon fingering weight yarn. Thanks to Mari Weideman for knitting this one for me!

If the last pattern was a good example of the beginnings of double-knit texture, this pattern shows the next steps. Instead of creating a garter-stitch fabric that can be worked alongside double-knitting but isn’t actually double-knit at all, true textured double-knitting creates purls on the outside of the work where there normally are only knits. If a fabric is worked entirely using this method, you get reverse double-stockinette; I call the technique used to do this “reverse double-knitting” or “RDK” for short. The honeycomb pattern is adapted almost verbatim from a standard single-color or two-color stranded pattern — but because I want the two sides to remain together, I needed to adjust things a little bit. While working, the pattern looks like slightly distorted bricks; it’s only when you block it that the hexagons really take shape.

When I work with a yarn company at one of the big shows, it means that they’ve agreed to sell my books and patterns for me so that I don’t have to be there when I can’t be (during my classes). It’s also a boon for them — they get to show off some eye-catching pieces that hopefully draw people into their booth. With any luck, once they’re in there and perusing my patterns, they might also see some of the luxurious yarn that’s also there. What’s always a little awkward, however, is when I don’t have a single pattern done in that yarn. I’ve been working with Bijou Basin Ranch for a long time, and they have a policy. If I’m sitting in their booth, waiting for people to come by for a book signing, and I want to knit to pass the time, I can only use their yarn. Lucky for me, it’s awesome yarn. As a result of their policy, I’ve designed a couple of pieces in their yak-fiber blends and Hexworth is the most recent. Sometimes when I choose colors, I like to go with a solid and a variegated, just to keep up the intrigue. With bold patterns like this one, where each yarn has a chance to shine, that works really well. Sometimes, when the pattern is too intricate, the solid gets lost among the variegated stitches. With this pattern, the end result is excellent — but the process was a little fiddly. There are places where the variegated gets a little close to the natural brown, but it’s not like Kauni — another color will be coming along very shortly and will reduce the confusion. The end result is well worth it, I think.

Like the last pattern, the name here is fairly straightforward. I wanted a sort of refined, masculine name that also referred to the shape of the motif, so the name “Hexworth” popped into my head and I haven’t been able to think of it as anything else since. I toyed briefly with the name “Graphene”, referring to the hexagonal carbon nano-structure, but I figured that would be a little too inaccessible of a name. But you know, the book’s not done yet, so it’s possible I’ll settle on Graphene instead. Which do you like better?

This pattern will be available in my upcoming book “Double Or Nothing”. To be informed when the preorder period begins, please join my preorder mailing list. Thanks!

This is week 6 of the pattern highlights from my upcoming book. If you like what you’re reading about, please join my preorder mailing list. To read more about why I’m doing this (and why you should join the list), you can visit the Month 5 blog post.

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Rustle Of Leaves is worked in Miss Babs Yowza!, a light worsted superwash merino yarn.

This is a pattern that was bouncing around in my mind, looking for a way out, when Craftsy rang me up to see about doing a kit to support one of the new yarn lines they were beginning to stock. This was back in 2013, not too long after my first Craftsy class came out. I was delighted to see that Miss Babs was one of the yarn lines they wanted patterns for, since I’d been seeing them at Rhinebeck and other shows for some time but their booth was always so mobbed that I had barely been able to set foot inside, let alone become familiar with their yarns. The idea behind this scarf was to have a maple leaf motif that tumbles down the center column, and the outer edges would ripple and ruffle around it, mimicking the movement of a leaf on the wind. I chose colors that evoked “autumn maple leaf” and “clear blue sky”, knowing that the other side would be somewhat surreal — blue leaves against a Martian sky, perhaps. I made it a keyhole scarf, because I was short on time and because it was an interesting twist — and because, if the hole was the same width as the center section, the ruffles would flip out on either side and lock the scarf in place. I finished it and sent it off to Craftsy, where they took a lovely set of photos which only showed the Martian sky side. Oh well. The piece is relatively simple but intriguing, and shows the beginnings of double-knit texture very well: the combination of double-knitting and doubled-yarn knitting.

As I mentioned above, Miss Babs yarn had intrigued me due to its popularity at the shows I went to, but I’d never really been able or willing to wade into the throngs of admirers to understand why it was so popular. One of the reasons, it turns out, is that they don’t wholesale to shops. The only place you ever get to fondle the giant, luscious skeins is at places like Rhinebeck. Otherwise you can order it online but that really only works if you’ve already been to a place where you can fondle it — or you’re willing to take a chance on reviews alone. Since it was offered, I took it, sight unseen (or unfelt, anyway), and, like many before me, I am a convert. Miss Babs, who I have had the pleasure of meeting in person since, has an incredible range of colors and fiber contents, not merely the standard stuff. OK, I ended up working with a 100% SW merino because it was what was offered — but I look forward to playing with more interesting fibers from them in the future.

The name of this pattern, “Rustle of Leaves” is straightforward. “Rustle” sounds like “ruffle” and the leaves are right out where you can see them. I like wordplay, but sometimes simple is best.

This pattern is already available but will also be available in my upcoming book “Double Or Nothing”. To be informed when the preorder period begins, please join my preorder mailing list. Thanks!