One of six children, I was raised by a busy mom, who instilled in me a love of fabric. Though I learned to sew and knit at a young age, it was the arrival of my first grandchild that pushed me into action. A long-time knitter, I am now ready to explore all things fiber.
Okay, I’ve lost track of which day I am on. (6-10-23: it’s days 28, 29, 30 and 31.)
What I can say is that Bill has given me about a half dozen photos of dragonflies.
Here are five:
While I have an idea for making a wall hanging; quilted, embroidered, and with painted dragonflies; for now I’m painting postcards. The purpose is to warm-up and to break my funky creative block.
In the process I’ve discovered that painting these beauties is like eating potato chips. It’s hard to stop once you get started.
I’ve tried to keep the dragonflies light and loose. They are so jewel-like in real life, the painted versions are but a poor imitation.
Made on Fabriano Studio cold press using watercolors, a micron pen for linework and Dr Ph Martin’s bleed-proof white for some highlights. I experimented with a silver pen on no. 3, but the shiny bits never show up in a photograph.
Since I returned from the cruise to Alaska, It’s been pretty hard for me to keep up my posts. First of all, we both came down with Covid. Recovery took 5 plus days. And then I found myself dissatisfied with my past work. It’s been a hard few weeks.
I thought an easy cast-on would help ease me back into things. So I chose a two-color cowl that will use up some stash yarn.
Spinal Twist, by Rebecca Marsh, starts with a crocheted provisional cast-on.
I have chosen some very soft single twist yarns. Labels have been lost, but it feels like there is some portion of alpaca.
Knit in the round, on large needles, with thick yarn. This could be finished in a week. By then, maybe my creativity will be unblocked and body fully healed.
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.
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.
In this exercise, I chose to paint washes that were opposites on the color wheel. Then I decided what the resulting painting reminded me of. Next I “brought out” the image.
Red Giant with webbing, using red and green.
Sunset over Circle Mountain, with yellow and purple.
Detail drawn in with watercolor pencils and Micron pens. Cold press paper by Winsor and Newton, 4 x 6.
Daily Fiber 