A Preface: Stranded Colorwork Tutorial

This tutorial has been a long time in coming.  The photos were taken in August of 2011.  I had just designed a herringbone and split chevron reversible cowl, and I wanted to put together an instructional handout for teaching a "Two-Handed Stranded Colorwork Class" using my new pattern.

I taught the class.  Later I renamed the pattern "Equilibrium" and submitted it to Interweave Press for Knitscene Accessories 2012, where it was accepted(!), which you can read about here.

But I never did get that tutorial together.  I want to need to (and, yes there is a reason for this need) give it a shot now even though I am thinking that the two year old photos may not be as good as I once thought them to be.

The topic is "Two-Handed Stranded Colorwork" which is really a lot to say at one time.  You should know that most stranded colorwork, also referred to by some as, "Fair Isle", involves working rows with two, and no more than two, colors at a time.

At some point in the history of this kind of knitting, someone thought that it might be a good idea to work with the two strands of yarn with one hand holding each color. 

Here is how you might hold the work on a two color row.

The actual "Two-Handed Stranded Colorwork Tutorial" (without a preface) will be my very next post.  It will begin with this photo.  Look for it in a day or two.

  

Midweek Meditation

"Don't go an inch without changing color."  ~Millard Sheets

  

Colorwork Meditation #8

"Let the blue sky meet the blue sea and all is blue for a time."   ~Moncy Barbour


Previous Colorwork Meditation: #7 (Squares)
 

And Not More (of the same)

This past weekend I was in a city that was not Philadelphia.

We went to New York to meet friends and we stayed two nights.  We had two great dinners and saw two great shows.  New York and Philadelphia are about the same distance from my home.  New York is a difficult city to drive into, and parking there can be costly... so, as for most of my previous trips to that amazing place, we took a bus.

By far, my best photos of the weekend were of One World Trade Center and a view from above the 16-acre World Trade Center site.

The tower and its spire are looking pretty near done, but if you look closely, you can see that a crane is still at the base of the spire.

Here was our incredible view of all that was below -- the 9/11 Memorial site.

The twin reflecting pools are set in the footprints of the twin towers.  Each one is nearly an acre in size and they feature the largest manmade waterfalls in North America.  The building behind the closest one is the 9/11 Memorial Museum.  (It did look like a giant motor home with a plastic slipcover.  I did not ask about that.)  In the foreground there is a concrete pad that will be a new subway station.  That fact interested me and I took this photo.

I have not talked about my own day job here, but it is an engineering kind of a job.  With so much work in progress on the pad, I knew that it would look very different there before too long.

We were on a 38th floor balcony of a hotel restaurant, and I kept thinking that I was hearing the waterfalls of the pools below.  My husband, who is a more technical hands-on engineering person, told me that what I heard was actually some kind of air hammer on a floor above.  I did not get to hear the waterfalls, or see the pools up close.  I will have to do that on another day.

It was my husband's friend who brought us to this place.  He is a construction engineering consultant who has been involved in the project for several years now.  He explained how the completion of the pools and museum by the tenth anniversary of 9/11 were so important to so many people, and yet, their presence now is somewhat of a daily hindrance to all the work that is still going on.

When we walked some of the streets below, I could not help thinking about all that had happened there.  There is a kind of spiritual presence, that can be felt all around that place.  It was quite a contrast with all of the activity at the site and the energy that is everywhere in the city.
          

More of the Same

We were back in Philadelphia.

We had drinks at a bar on the deck of this boat.
It was my birthday.

They had a lot of plants.

 

It was extremely hot.  (When the heat gets a bit oppressive, all I do is remember the dark frigidness of winter, and I feel fine.  I think to myself that if I could feel this heat for just 10 minutes in January, I would absolutely love it.)

 

I have not posted in a while because I have nothing new to post.  I am working hard on some designs that I cannot share.  I have done an amazing amount of swatching.  Bit by bit, swatch by swatch, I have been figuring  out what I will do...

Sometimes it feels all a jumble.  But I keep on with it.

I never stop knitting.
The answers come slowly...

Midweek Meditation

"The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown."  ~  Carl Jung


"The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."  ~  Albert Einstein
 

My Scrunchable FO

I had only two FO's in June.  (I will be quiet about one of them.  It is my own design, and when the time is right, I hope to release the pattern.)

The June FO that I am writing about today is my Hakusa which I nicknamed "Scrunchable".  My two favorite FO photos are:

Finished June 15, 2013

Pattern: Hakusa Scarf by Kristen Johnstone
Size: Large

Yarns by Habu Textiles:

 A-20/21 1/20 silk stainless steel, Color #8 (pale gray/green), 2 cones
N-75 2/48 Fine Merino, Color #3024 (deep forest), 1 cone

Project Notes:

1)  The cast-on with the single strand of superfine lace-weight metallic yarn requires a great deal of patience, as does the first few rows, but any determined knitter can get through that...  (:-))

2)  The unique triangular shape is created by increasing 1 stitch every 6th row on the RS end of row, and deceasing a total of 3 stitches every 2 rows on the opposite edge.  On RS rows this includes a sl1-k1-psso on the heels of another sl1-k1-psso.  I found this to be too bunchy, and I knit a stitch in between.  The finished edge is still a bit "pulled" looking as you can see in the photo below.

I think that I have enough yarn left to make a second Hakusa in the smaller size (which I would call a neckerchief).  This really is a great mindless grab-and-go project once you get past that pesky beginning part.  I have already started, and have several of the decrease rows completed.  This time I have added even more stitches between the decreases working all RS rows as in:  K3, ssk, k2, ssk, k to end.  It looks a lot smoother.

3) A final note:  I slipped the first stitch on every row before the decreasing began and then only on the WS rows after that.
Knit Rows (before decreasing):  Wyif, sl 1 pwise, move yarn to back, knit.
Purl Rows (for entire project):  Wyib, sl 1 kwise, move yarn to front, purl (purling 2 tog at end once the decreasing starts).
This makes a more finished edge, but is definitely not needed on knit rows once all that decreasing begins.

Happy summer knitting!

k*tog Oklahoma Tornado Relief

"On May 20, 2013, a huge tornado wreaked havoc on Moore, Oklahoma, tearing right through the town. It was rated an EF5, the highest possible, with 340 km/hr (210 mile/hour) winds. Two dozen people lost their lives, hundreds were injured, and thousands of buildings sustained damage—from minor problems to complete razing."*

In the days after the devastation, Holly Barcelo and Lars Rains of the design collective, Suburban Knits, felt the need to help in some way. They thought of creating an ebook of designs for charity, and they invited other designers to contribute as well.

Holly and Lars wanted to get the collection together as quickly as possible, so they requested patterns that were already up on Ravelry.  I contributed my Jemma Cowl pattern to this ebook, which remarkably,was ready for purchase by June 3rd.  K*tog is a collection of 20 patterns by 19 designers and will be available from now through August 31 for only $20.  All proceeds from the sale of this ebook will be donated to Other Options, Inc. a food pantry in Oklahoma City that is shuttling supplies to the affected areas in Oklahoma.

The k*tog ebook can be downloaded here where you will also find a table of contents and thumbnail photos of all of the designs in the collection.  k*tog has a pattern page on Ravelry, where, as of today, nine of the patterns are linked.  There is such a great variety of patterns in the collection which includes socks, hats, shawls, cowls, a vest, a cardigan, a pair of mitts and even a baby cocoon.  Truly, something for everyone!

* Plait, Phil. "The Scar of a deadly Tornado."  June 28, 2013 <http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/06/09/satellite_view_of_a_tornado_the_moore_ok_devastation_seen_from_space.html>

Midweek Meditation

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."  ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Great sentiment, but I would have to add some yarn and some needles. ☺