Daily Archives: May 18, 2012

Ideas Generate More Ideas

First the hand report–looks like it might just be tendonitis.  I know how to treat that.  I usually leave out the Rest part though.  Thanks for your good wishes and inquiries.

Rereading the last post about activities for kids this summer, I realized that there were some things in there for us knitters and crafters.  Let me draw your attention to two things.

First the color wheel activity.  Years ago at the Colorado Knitting Camp, Judy Ditmore of Interlacements came to help teach us colorwork skills.  Judy was a well-known weaver who had begun a yarn dyeing business so she had really worked the idea of seeing color.  She brought suitcases full of balls and cones of yarn.  Much of it appeared to be leftovers from her own projects.  The first thing we did was get in the floor and arrange all that yarn into a giant colorwheel.

When I came back to Charlotte that year, I pulled out my own stash and repeated the activity.  I was stunned to see that I, who owned a ton of yarn, had significant holes in my color wheel.  Not one single skein of yellow or gold or anything near it.  And I knew that yellow was one of those colors that make others pop and look great.  A row of yellow in a fair isle pattern is almost invisible, but makes your purples vibrant.   And do I ever have a load of purples!!

Take the time to try this for yourself.  I know you THINK you know what colors you have, but when you get them all out and together, you notice that you don’t just have red, but orange-red and a blue red, and does this fuschia go with the reds or the purples??  You’ll have fun, learn something, and probably rediscover a neat yarn you had forgotten.

Second was this picture from Microsoft Office files.

We knitters associate spider webs with lace.  The thinnest lace yarns are even called Spider Web.  Look at this picture again and at how uneven the “lace” is.  Yet it is still delicate and beautiful.  I wonder if Myra Wood who wrote Crazy Lace saw something like this and was inspired.

In Australia, in my creative tsunami, I crocheted some laceweight yarn into what I called a Walkabout scarf.  I just did whatever without counting or thinking and occasionally looked at it and somehow made it a bit straighter.  I still love that scarf, but most of all, I loved that I carried the project all over Brisbane with me and did public lace knitting.  Without a chart or a pattern.  Just made it up.

After Debbie Carlsen told me about Myra Wood’s book, I got a copy through interlibrary loan and then played with knitting random lace patterning.  This was really fun.  It was easier to keep the edges straight by just trying to wind up with the same number of stitches on every row.  In other words, any time I did a yarnover to put in a hole, I made certain that I did a k2tog somewhere on the row, but not necessarily beside the YO.

Not blocked, just pinned out

Again it was fun, easy to carry around for KIP time, and once blocked, looked like it had been planned all along.  I really encourage you to give this a try.  It makes great summer knitting because it is so light weight.  And since artists are always saying they take their inspiration from nature, well, if irregular patterns are okay with spiders, why not with me?

Oh, put that lace weight on a size 6 or so needle.  If you want lace, then stay away from tiny needles.  At least for this activity.

More later–

Categories: color, freeform, lace, Personal thoughts | 3 Comments

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