Final pattern for 2025: Phoenix

This pattern is a long time coming. Literally, since it’s simultaneously a nostalgic nod to a childhood blanket, a long-overdue foray into metapixel knitting, and a symbol of regrowth after a life-changing disaster.

In June of 2020, mere weeks after the loss of my home in a catastrophic fire, a fan named Cindy emailed me to offer two skeins of Kauni, famously a favorite yarn of mine, which she had no immediate need for. I graciously accepted, and when I opened the box, the colorways she’d offered brought tears to my eyes: fire and ash, a symbol of the disaster but an opportunity to build something new.

Over the next 5 years, in parallel with the grueling task of rebuilding our home, I slowly worked on this sample. What few personal effects I still owned were in a storage unit, and in a small wooden chest there were some blankets that I’d grown up with — including a very 1970s yellow-and-brown cotton one with an overshot-woven motif. I decided to chart this motif and work it into a pattern. I took some liberties with the chart repeat so that the scarf width would be manageable, and I took a risk in choosing the sequence of repeats — I only hoped that it would be doable in a single pair of Kauni’s uniquely massive skeins.

My intention was for this pattern to help me “rise from the ashes” of my literal house fire, but over the ensuing years, much has changed in my knitting life as well. The ashes are now metaphorical as well as literal — the last two years spent largely disconnected from my knitting has given me perspective on how I want the future of my knitting to work; you can read more about that in my previous post. I had been working on this sample off and on but, like a lot of my knitting, it had been on pause at about 2/3 finished. When we moved back into our rebuilt condo, I decided to return to it and make a push to have this pattern be the first release of my new life in the new space. A few months later — it is. Oh, and did I make it within the original two skeins? Well, yes, but it was close:

Without further ado, please welcome Phoenix to the fold — a scarf that symbolizes a new life grown out of the ashes of the old.

p.s. What is “metapixel knitting” I hear you ask? This is something I came up with years ago as I was mulling over the next steps beyond the Parallax patterns. Essentially, the idea was to map non-checkerboard patterns into the Parallax-style frameworks. I intended to do a lot more with this concept, and even had the start of a web-based app to help with designing these strange patterns, but life got in the way as usual. It also turns out that overshot weaving is a very good example of metapixel motif work, so even if I didn’t use the app, I did end up with a solid foray into that style.

In other news

I will be teaching a few workshops at Red Alder in Tacoma, WA next February; they are now in my calendar but here’s a quick list:

• Sat, Feb 14, 9am-12pm: Intro to Double-knitting
• Sat, Feb 14, 1:30-4:30pm: Two-pattern Double-knitting
• Sun, Feb 15, 9am-12pm: Advanced Beginner Double-knitting
• Sun, Feb 15, 1:30-4:30pm: Multi-color Double-knitting

Also, my book/pattern sale continues, albeit on Priority Mail only during the holiday shipping chaos season. Please help me clear out my inventory to make room for a better, more sustainable knitting future for Fallingblox Designs. You can save money, help one of your favorite designers, and give the gift of creative adventurousness to a knitter in your life — what more can you ask in this economy? Media Mail shipping will return in January. Shop now, shop later, shop early, shop often. Thanks!

Alasdair Post-Quinn, “Softwear Engineer”, Fallingblox Designs