Knitting on Impulse

Coneflower Gloves

Knit to my daughter's exacting specifications and pronounced (by her) to be "way better than I ever imagined," these are basic knit-to-fit stockinette gloves garnished with a smidge of inexpert embroidery and two all-important pom poms.

 
"Knit-to-fit" in this case, incurred a certain degree of whinging about the four zillion fittings required to get the fingers of the first glove exactly right.

I don't think I'll win any prizes for embroidery, but you can make out a general petal-ish impression, right?

Not entirely unlike a Coneflower?

The recipient is thrilled, which in the end, is what really matters.

 
The yarn was a tragically knot-containing skein of Blissful Sock in Echinacea.  (There were actually two more, each with a single knot, that I kept back - I suppose if anyone is so inclined, I could knock off a buck or so for the knot and let them go....) I have to say, I really loved working with this sock yarn - the superwash treatment has done nothing at all to diminish the sheen and wooly softness characteristic of BFL.  Sheer pleasure to knit up.

Purple Broccoli

At a glance, it reads strictly purple...

Yet, if you really look, there's also a lovely range of pinks dancing with dusky royal blues:

Here's what I came up with:

Essential Merino Lace

Summit Sock

Camel Silk

SuperNatural Silk

 

Chasing Rainbows

Every so often a moment of sunshine interrupts October's perpetual rain:

Which got me wondering: what would happen if I took a closer look at a photographed rainbow?  I tend not to pay them much attention as a colour subject - they seem something of a cliche, shorthand for "stripes of everything".

Try as I might, I could only find very desaturated hues.  Perhaps the eye interprets a brilliance that isn't technically present?  So I boosted the colour saturation with the photoeditor:

And again:

Interesting - the cool end of the spectrum comes up vividly, but the warm hues remain muted.  Look at the palette all together, though:

It is almost an exact replica of the heathery hues in my stash of Jamieson & Smith 2 ply.  I'm quite sure this is not a coincidence.  I wonder if tropical rainbows are more intense, or perhaps it is simply the brilliance of the light and the surrounding flora that inspires the saturated colour sensibility of sunnier climes.

Patterns in Nature: Luminous

Today's pattern is derived from one of my favorite high alpine photos of the past summer:

The intense mountain top light seems to suffuse everything it touches with an otherworldly radiance.  I was particularly taken with the shades of red and pink juxtaposed against the glowing leaves.

The chosen palette of colours:

The idea of otherworldly radiance set off a train of thought about labyrinths and moving toward the light, and this is what I came up with:

It's a 24x24 stitch repeat.  The first or second set of 12 rows would make a splendid border for a deep olive or dark cherry red cardigan.  For a bolder effect, the pattern is fully repeatable and on a grander scale, looks like this :

 

Patterns in Nature: Dragonfly

After a summer rich with photo opportunities, I figured it was high time I got back to doing these.  I would resolve to resume the weekly routine, but that would guarantee the materialization of some unforseen crisis, so let's just say I have a vaguely general sort of intention to almost-but-not-quite plan an every-7th-day-ish sort of thing.

You may recall the dragonfly my daughter was enamoured with a few weeks ago:

Who could fail to love a bug with such a wondrous colour scheme? (Also, I had no idea they had such cute little faces.)

Breaking down the colours:

I selected a palette:

And created a simple geometric overlay reminiscent of the wing structure:

This would also be quite effective worked as a solid yarn with an appropriately hued handpaint.

Avoidance

Down to the crunch.  Today we set up the tables and display for a dry run (you don't get pictures, because simulating the contents of a 10'x10'tent in a condo that nowhere contains that amount of contiguous floor space meant that quite a lot of the consequences of 8-seconds-a-day housekeeping were visible.  In other words, if you saw the photos, you probably wouldn't respect me in the morning.)  I'll post photos of the actual Market set-up Sunday night.

The dry run was encouraging, in the sense that it actually looked quite nice, and the scarves made a satisfying swath of textile-ish colour, and I felt a small surge of pride at having created so much Stuff in 3 1/2 weeks.  Then I went around the tables and made notes on holes that needed filling in the product lines (so it doesn't look stupidly incomplete), and tags and labels, and coverings and informative signs that really must be done before the 17th.  And after constructing a tidy bulleted task list for the days between now and then, the glow of accomplishment duly faded and I feel overwhelmed once again.  Fortunately, I have some very cool knitting with which to engage in avoidant behaviour:

Remember this?

Details of how I pulled out a palette can be found here - suffice it to say, I went with shades of brown, steel grey, dark red, and purple.

I may have overshot on the amount of purple. 

I decided to play with optical mixing, painting the skein so that one row would be red graduating to purple (I'm not exactly sure how that bit after the nicely shaded pink got so suddenly bright purple - I guess I'm still getting the hang of the medium), and the alternate row would be the desaturated shades - brown graduating to grey.  Initially, I thought I would go for a vertically aligned format - red with brown, purple with grey.

But then I lined it up the other way, and that was awfully pretty too:

So I figured that by making the width of the scarf just a half stitch or so different than the width of the skein, the colour bands would stay together and slowly meander from side to side (as in the first iteration of the green scarf), reversing their orientation at intervals.  This is what happened (so far):

Closer:

The cool thing about seed stitch is that the adjacent stitches are at different heights, so the optical mix shifts as you view it from different angles, enhancing the luminous effect.

Now IF my tension were absolutely consistent, those lines would be zigging and zagging in perfect straight-edged precision.  Since they are not, I can only conclude that my tension must vary, though not to a degree that is visible in the actual stitch formation.  (It wouldn't take much of a difference, multiplied over twenty-some stitches, to shift the pattern a couple of stitches by the following row, though.)  And now I am fascinated with the notion of actually achieving that degree of control - not solely for the purpose of making perfectly straight lines, but to have the freedom to make.... whatever I want.  Like intersecting sine waves.  Or handpainted argyle.  The mind boggles. 

Sun and Rain (continued)

One of the core principles in traditional Fair Isle is the practice of maintaining approximately constant levels of contrast throughout the pattern.  While value is not the only factor contributing to contrast, it is a very useful place to start. 

The greyscale function is a great way to analyze value, independent of the confounding variables of warmth and saturation :

The palettes rearranged in order of value:

Starting with the ribbing, I chose to anchor the bottom of the pattern with the darkest values, graduating upward to the lightest.  Here's where some eyeballing and judgement comes into play - I kept the sequence intact, but strategically repeated certain colours in order to control the level of contrast.

I tried a blues-on-copper pattern, again keeping the sequence but strategically playing with proportions to keep the contrasts similar throughout.  Occasionally, when the saturation of a particular colour made it too prominent regardless of proportions, I simply omitted it from that sequence.  Conversely, when there wasn't enough contrast, I skipped forward to a more intense hue, and continued the sequence from there.

I kept the motif very simple, in keeping with the original photo.  Copper-on-blue:

One possibility for putting it together:

This is perhaps the simplest of an infinite array of possibilities, and missing many of the design elements of traditional Fair Isle, but it does illustrate some useful concepts in juxtaposing colours for two-stranded knitting.

Sun and Rain

I thought it was high time to get back to playing with creating patterns from photos.  This week's subject is not technically a natural object, though it does represent nature at work.

It is the weathered edge of the Celestri sculpture which graces the courtyard of the Four Seasons hotel, across the road from our condo.

I used the mosaic function to tease out individual colours:

This is just begging for a Fair Isle treatment - the juxtaposition of desaturated cool hues with the hot peachy copper, and the sober shades of black anchoring the bottom.  The cracks in the metal clearly suggest the shaded two colour ribbing that would border the garment.

The first step is to sample each of the three main colour groupings (I generally start by pulling out as many different colour variants as I can find, without worrying about order or proportion.)

But since this is getting to be an awfully long and picture-heavy post, I shall carry on with the process of analyzing, ordering, and patterning tomorrow.

Sunny Crocuses

We found more signs of spring in the Village yesterday:

The palette:

Like a swirl of monastery robes, these saffron jewel tones need to be presented in great swaths of saturated colour.  I envision collecting the yarns and assembling them spontaneously, in a freeform garter stitch or log cabin-ish style.

For a somewhat literal botanical reference, one could join the squares with tidy stripes of green and white:

 

Early Buds

After several days of torrential rain, it seemed that spring was inevitable.

Then we had a little relapse.

Never mind, I am drawing the blinds and going with option number one.

Because it is high time for a little pink around here.

I envision knitting the pinks into a bud shape in somewhat random order, though I think the brownish pinks should be on the bottom, as per nature.

As much as I find the browny-blue-grey of the branch intriguing, it gets a bit busy in this format.  I think the background would be better as a soft grey solid, or perhaps a subtle handpaint.

I see a pillow or a blanket, or perhaps 2 or 3 repeats as a deliciously feminine border on a fine spring cardigan.