WIP – Mosaic Stitch Swatches

For today’s post on work in progress, I’d like to share my adventure in choosing a mosaic stitch design for my crescent shawl.

To get started, I picked up Barbara Walker’s excellent Treasury of Knitting Patterns, published in 1968. Chapter Four (Color Changing Patterns) contains advice and 76 different examples of mosaic stitch. The first one I tried is called Rippled Chevron.

For the 1st pattern repeat, I used stockinette stitch. The second repeat was knitted in garter stitch. I liked this pattern, and it was quite easy. The garter stitch version would work better with my shawl design.

Continuing my swatch, I went for something more complicated: Dotted Diamond.

I love the look of this pattern. After knitting it I began to see how an exciting piece of knitting could be made by working a sequence of different mosaic stitches with different background yarns and one foreground yarn.

All of this swatching around is very fun and instructive. But I concluded that Mrs. Walker’s patterns were all very geometric looking. I craved a pattern that appeared more curvilinear – almost flower-like. So my next step was to use the advanced search option on Ravelry to find some flower-like mosaic patterns. This took a good hour. Eventually I discovered a pattern for socks that incorporated mosaic designs inspired by Native American symbols.

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/burntwater-socks

This is getting closer to what I had in mind. After making a few final adjustments and switching to a bigger needle, I started knitting the resulting pattern into my shawl. By yesterday evening I was half-way finished with the 50-row pattern.

I love what’s happening here. My original swatch was too narrow to give me any idea of the secondary pattern in the design. When several pattern repeats are worked, the wing-like lines between the circles clearly stand out. This makes me happy.

Barbara’s treasury is truly a treasure. If you can get your hands on this book, you will find it immensely useful in expanding your knowledge and skills. Kudos also to Mary the Hobbit, who designed the Burntwater socks. This pattern could easily become my next sock project.