Breaking my radio silence (and new ground)

I’ve been a bad little blogger (surprise surprise) but I have an excuse … I’ve been in “creative mode” for the past month or two, working on new ideas and, finally, I have a prototype for a new pattern.

Unfortunately, until the book is out, it only shows that this is possible and practical — there will be no instructions on it outside of the book for now. The sheer quantity of new techniques is going to make this piece prohibitively complex to release as a standalone pattern — sorry.

Without further ado, this is Ferronnerie. A French-named technique deserves a French-named pattern, and since this is double-knit entrelac, its name translates to “wrought-iron” in French. The yarn is Quince & Co Finch, and it takes less than a skein of each of 4 colors, even for the largest size. Check out the brim as well.

There are a number of unique things you can do with DK entrelac that you can’t (easily) do in standard entrelac, but I’ll describe those at a later date. In short, for a number of reasons, I feel like double-knitting is incredibly well-suited to entrelac and I hope this will open some new creative doors for other designers in the future.

As you may have seen in my previous post on double-knit entrelac, I had a number of hurdles to overcome before I could do this. It’s what kept me from working it out earlier — but now that I’m in “creative mode” I’m in the mindset to systematically resolve many problems. Documenting them is still sketchy, however. In order to do this piece, I had to work out double-knit invisible short rows, double-knitting backward, picking up stitches along edges, keeping all 4 edges of each diamond fully locked, decreasing the sizes of the diamonds appropriately to shape the closure properly, and creating a final closure that requires minimal seaming. As you can imagine, this will take a whole chapter in my new book to properly document. I look forward to it — but it’s going to be a while.

In other news

I have yet to schedule any LYS workshops for the Spring — if you know of any who’d be interested, please have them contact me — but in addition to the upcoming gigs this November and December, and the two big shows already scheduled for the Spring (see my previous post for dates), I’d like to announce that I’m now scheduled for ANOTHER big show: Stitches South in Nashville, TN, from April 23-26, 2015. I’ll post more upcoming dates once I’ve got them nailed down.