Intentional Knitting

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially coming into the New Year - the idea of intentional knitting. We knit for so many reasons - to pass the time, to occupy idle hands, to create gifts for loved ones, to make special things for ourselves, but I’ve really been focused on the idea of the thought process that occurs during the act of knitting.

Have you ever knit something for someone for a special occasion like a wedding or a birth? Have you ever knit something for someone who has suffered a loss? What did you think about while you worked on it? Were you pouring your love and heartfelt thoughts for that family or those people into your stitches and the work?

Throughout my life, I have used knitting in different ways. I once knit something for a friend who’s sister had passed away. In thinking about her loss, I imagined what that loss might feel like to me, if it had happened to my own sister. It allowed me to put the energy of my grief into something positive.

My most well known piece, the Butterfly/Papillon Shawl was created during a time of immense stress & unhappiness in my life. I used the making of that shawl and the pattern writing to try to occupy my mind and keep me from focusing on the intangible things in my life that felt out of control. It is incredible that such great beauty came from so much sadness and pain. I know that that particular piece has brought frustration to some, but upon completion seems to have brought such joy and pride to many. This is an amazing turn of energy. A turn to love and positivity.

Throughout this year, I will be publishing several new designs that aim at focusing this thought on intentional knitting. One design that I’m working on is very symbolic. I have used the pattern to touch on the history and the meaning of the symbols to give you a path for knitting it intentionally. I am including the idea that if you KNIT the piece with some of these thoughts and ideas in mind, you will be creating something beautiful with powerful energy in it. Whether or not this seems real to you, what could be better in this world than to have a large portion of your time and energy directed to beautiful thoughts? I firmly believe (relating to the previous paragraph) that something you do TODAY can become something amazing down the road.

Something simple and pure, maybe mundane and seemingly average; just might grow into a piece of intense meaning. This can manifest in many ways. You never know the power of what you are creating. Even if it is only powerful to you or to someone you love.

Pivot: Allowing Ideas to Rise to the Top

“When life takes a turn and throws you a loop, sometimes you just have to react and go with the flow! This project I’ve been working on for the last couple months - designing a twelve month blanket to coincide for the Jimmy Beans Wool “Blanket Club” with Urth Yarns Monokrom Worsted, including some EXCLUSIVE colorways, hit a turning point when I realized that it just wasn’t right for the format.

OH RATS!

So, as you do in life, you pivot… you change direction and move forward.

While I still LOVE the previous idea and will come back to it later on, my new plans for the CLUB are more in line with expectations AND really a great exploration into some areas of knitting that I have not played with for a while. What is interesting to me, is that while I regret stopping the last process and putting a design I admire aside, I am also loving the new idea. The design looks great and I think it fulfills the need & will match expectations of club members participating in Jimmy Beans Wool’s Blanket Club 2022.

The JBW exclusive is available here:
https://www.jimmybeanswool.com/knitting/yarn/JimmyBeansWool/2022UrthYarnsBlanketClub.asp?showLarge=true&specPCVID=104539

I will regain rights for this pattern in 2023 and it will be available here and on Ravelry at that time. https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/urth-strata

Maybe the lesson, if we want to look for one, is that compromise (or a pivot, or a change) can be hard and feel bad at first; while in the long run feeling better and better as we progress into it.

My bonus, NOW, is that I have 2 great ideas in the works, instead of only one.”

…time passes… a few months in fact…

I started this blog post when I was STUCK trying to make the BLANKET CLUB better… then I promptly forgot about it. Is it IRONIC that I have now completed BOTH ideas into finished projects and patterns? I’m not sure. But, I am very happy to say that both of these pieces are stunning and exciting. Both of these pieces are completely different.

The second one will launch SOON, both here and on Ravelry. It’s called Quinn’s Quilt and I am working on a matching pillow (pillow cover/ pillowcase) Quinn’s Pillow. That was the original idea in this post. I am not sure which one I like better as they are both so different. These Quinn projects both will launch later this month. The Quilt in conjunction with a new (domestically sourced and produced) yarn with a great story from Jimmy Bean’s Wool. The pillow using another domestically grown and produced yarn from Morehouse Merino.

I feel like I WON in this round of rampant ideas … even though they were not linear to what I needed.

Quinn’s Quilt

I’m very excited to announce that I was asked to design a knitting pattern for the Jimmy Bean’s Wool 2022 Blanket Club! For those of you that are unfamiliar, the club consists of 12 months of yarn with a companion crochet or knit pattern. Yarns are shipped monthly January through December so you can look forward to receiving a little surprise each month.

The 2022 Blanket will be in worsted weight yarn and dyed by Urth Yarns in their Monokrom colorways - including some exclusive new colors. There will be two color palettes, one which is very vibrant and bright and the other more neutral / earthy. (Can you believe I didn’t pick the bright one for my sample?!!) There will be ten colors in total with one unifying color, which will be sent three times over the course of the year.

My enthusiasm for being asked to design something was soon overwhelmed by my horror of not having all the yarns in my hot little hands at the same time. Okay - that’s a little bit of a lie. JBW did send me the first three quarters of the yarn installments (January - September) all at once. What I realized would be a huge challenge for me was that each knitter would only be able to start with one color. Oh, FUDGE! Well this will be interesting!

I am now about a week into the project and both the Urth version and the beta version are well underway. I believe that the final piece is going to be amazing! I’m afraid that there will be very little knitting for people to do in January, however it might give people a chance to practice the techniques and become familiar with the skills that will be used over and over again throughout the pattern. Once a month has passed, I know that things will pick up quickly.

I’m not ready to divulge the entire idea yet, but I will say I am making it relatively seamless, masterfully using the colors provided. Each person’s version will end up being individual to them because of the tonal quality of Urth’s Monokrom yarn. I think the pattern will be easy enough for an adventurous beginner and also satisfying for a well seasoned knitter.

Techniques employed in this design include: M1L (Make One Left), M1R (Make One Right), K2Tog (Knit Two Together), SSK (Slip, Slip, Knit), YO (Yarn Over), SL1-kw (Slip One Knitwise), P1tbl (Purl One through the Back Loop), and K (Knit). There’s almost no purling in this design. It is primarily done in garter stitch. It uses Intarsia and Bobbins (actually you just wind your 100gr skeins into 50gr balls*).

I can’t wait to share the design with you later this year.

* I have developed a clever way for you to do this without a gram scale and will post videos in the coming months with visual tutorials.

Vacation Butterfly: Blocking

Do you have any special recommendations for blocking this garment?

This shawl was so large that inevitably I don’t have any good pictures of it being blocked. I think the best pictures to show how it was blocked are from my test knitters. One is attached below from my dear friend Vanessa.

I firmly believe that any blocking is a very stylistic choice. You are not at all required to block it the way I did. In fact many of you might have better ideas of how to block it that I might be envious of. So don’t feel that my suggestions are the way to go. My samples were blocked the same way for consistency and I asked my test knitters and sample knitters to do the same. My aims in blocking the way I did were to open up the bottom of the shawl and allow you to see all aspects of the design.

Because some yarns will bleed I do not use soak wash or any detergent. Bleeding usually relates to the ph level of your water. It does not necessarily relate to whether or not the yarn was dyed correctly. So, finding out you have the right ph level in your water by soak washing and having something bleed can be a terrible way to discover this. The addition of soak wash or wool wash can adversely impact the ph level and make things even worse. I choose to use only cold water in this process. I like to use the washing machine and the rinse + spin cycle. This thoroughly wets my knitting and the spin cycle gets most of the water out. This benefits my drying time and it also means that I'm never picking up my knitting when it is so wet that I will stretch my piece. I love it! I feel that this is the simplest way to “wash” your work before blocking.

One of the best articles I’ve read about the science behind ph levels in water and how they effect yarn is by Kimber Baldwin and found at https://fiberopticyarns.com/blogs/latest-news/how-to-wash-items-made-with-hand-dyed-yarns-or-fiber

BUY PATTERN

Vacation Butterfly: Yarn Choices

The simplest approach to choosing yarn for this shawl is to select Urth Monokrom or Urth Uneek. The reason I enjoy working with these fibers is that the the color choices are made for you through the yarn. If you choose instead to work with separate colors, you will need to decide where to place those colors. If you prefer this path, we have supplied a color planning sheet for your yarn mapping and you can follow my example in the Mad_Tosh shawl. It is your choice - either you ride the wave of letting the Urth yarns happen as they will or you choose to make the choices yourself.

If you are selecting hank dyed yarns rather than blank dyed yarns*, I have a few pointers for you. In my opinion tonal or speckled yarns are best for three of your colors, and a highly variegated color section yarn only works well in one place, because otherwise the section yarn starts to fight against the design of the short rows and can visually distract from the pattern. Personally, I would not suggest one of these gorgeous yarns to be used as anything other than MC1. Although I have not knit this in blank dyed yarns other than Urth, I’m certain there are other options out there.

Regarding the use of alternate yarns: Should you opt to work with yarns other than those recommended in this pattern, I advise asking your friendly local yarn store or online retailer to help you with those decisions. Since I do not sell yarn, I do not feel qualified in helping you with those choices, so please seek this assistance through a qualified retail source.

* Hank dyed is a shorter color transition than hand dyed yarn. Blank dyed means the dyer uses a knitted blank and can do longer color transitions.

Vacation Butterfly: A Conversation with the Designer

Why did you name this pattern “Vacation Butterfly”?

There’s more than one answer to that question. The first being that it has elements of the original Butterfly Shawl, but it also has some contemplative space that is not as complex. To my mind that’s like a little mini-vacation. So that was the original thought for the name, but in reality I had been working on another design and hit a road block and I stopped knitting altogether and was very frustrated. I needed a project that would provide inspiration and satisfaction and I found it in this pattern. Using this new piece as a sidebar and being able to ignore the other design gave my brain the vacation it needed to start working on the previous work again and enjoy knitting.

I noticed that you have divided this pattern into three very distinct sections: ‘Packing’, ‘Travel’, and ‘Back to Work’. What is the significance of each of them and why did you choose to make these separations?

That’s kind of funny, I think - going with the theme of vacation and also in conjunction with what was going on in my own life. I started this project before I went on vacation so I called the first section ‘Packing’. I wanted to complete that before I traveled because the section I call ‘Travel’ is very easy knitting and I was able to do it on planes and in airports without needing the pattern. [Of course the first version I made used Urth yarn and I wasn’t changing colors.]

The last section is the complicated section. To me returning from vacation usually means I want a staycation at home in order to return to reality, but I never seem to get one, so I have called this section ‘Back to Work’. It’s the part of the shawl where you need to pay the most attention and really follow carefully in order to achieve magnificent results.

You mentioned the original butterfly design. What’s different about this one?

This new design certainly pays homage to the original, however it is larger, and this is achieved by having more stitches in the bottom section. One of the reasons for this change is that I didn’t want the bottom of this shawl to be exactly the same in the center as the previous Butterfly. There’s also a very different ending with simple open work, interesting shaping placement, and finally an applied garter bind-off to match the top garter edge. In conclusion, there are few new ideas in this revisit of the original design, but with a fun challenge ahead. I hope you enjoy!