High Country Crescent

One of my favourite places is the High Country of the South Island (of NZ), and I've always wanted to design a shawl that reflects its stark beauty. High Country Crescent is my first attempt to do that (as I rather think there are many more knitting motifs to be found in that stunning landscape).

Parched, stony, vast and rugged, this harsh land is connected from the mountains to the sea by a network of sprawling braided rivers, and unassuming plants. This shawl, High Country Crescent, is my homage to that harsh, desolate and beautiful landscape – a landscape that inspires and yet dwarfs the human spirit. Lace and cable stitches create knitted motifs representing braided rivers and tussock flowing to the estuary where High Country river meets the Pacific Ocean

I designed this shawl some time ago, but I really wanted to get photos of it in the actual High Country before I released it on Ravelry. Our summer holidays were the perfect time, and on New Years day we made our way to the headwaters of Lake Tekapo. I know there's snow in the background, but it was hot! (click on the photos to enlarge them, so you can see the detail).

This one was taken at Otira gorge - more Alpine than High Country, but stunning nonetheless and another glorious warm day.

and finally a close up.

I knit mine in Zealana Kiwi Laceweight (colour; Sunset), but any laceweight will do so long as it's not superfine. A 3 ply or light fingering would substitute well too, as Zealana Kiwi is quite a chubby yarn.
It's available in two sizes and requires 600 - 686 metres of yarn. For more information and other examples check out my Ravelry store.

Biophilia

If you follow me on Ravelry  or Instagram you might know that Biophilia has been in the pipeline for a while.

 

 I started off wanting to work with an adapted 'pod' pattern someone in my spinning guild had found and used spectacularly in a baby blanket. Alas, the pods didn't really work in with anything else, and I had to omit them. For such a simple looking pattern, this is probably the one I have toiled on the most. But it's a sweetie - I love how the seaweed like pattern fans out at the edge, and ends with a few beads at the edge, and dripping off the picot points, as if it were recently plucked from the ocean depths.

The yarn is Vintage Purls sock - in the colour Songs of the Sea. Isn't it gorgeous!
You will need approx 495 metres of yarn and 245 size 6 seed beads.

I must backtrack a little. Biophilia is a free pattern available on Ravelry, and part of KiwiYarns Sustain the Sea collection. Biophilia is a term used to describe a hypothetically innate human tendency to feel an emotional attachment to the natural world. The idea that human wellbeing is utterly dependent upon our positive interactions with the natural world and its biological diversity makes conservation of the planet’s ecological systems imperative. This decades old theory is even more relevant today as we continue to transform the planet in our quest for perpetual economic growth. Regardless of whether the tendency for biophilia exists or not, human dependence upon the natural world and its complex ecosystems is a fundamental truth, and yet we continue to plunder the Earth’s resources, and foul the waterways and seas.

But it's a free pattern with a twist, and I have a lot more to say about it - go have a look on Ravelry!

The Lace Eater Shawl

The Lace Eater Shawl KAL starts on September the 1st!

Have you got your yarn ready?

The Lace Eater came from a desire to depict the all-consuming passion that lace knitting inspires in those of us addicted to lace knitting. 

Cables twist and turn as they move across the surface of the knitted fabric - undulating - consuming the lace … like an infection.

The Lace Eater, an elongated triangular crescent shawl, will challenge lace lovers. You will be required to work from multiple charts, to work increases and decreases on RS and WS rows. Nupps and gathered stitches give texture to the fabric, while cables consume lace motifs as they advance across the fabric.
Rippling with cables and lace, wrap the The Lace Eater shawl about your shoulders and celebrate your lace addiction!

Succumb to your lace addiction - join us for the Lace Eater KAL(when the pattern becomes available for download September 1st), in my Ravelry Group: Lace Eater Designs, and knit this fascinating shawl with others celebrating their lace addiction.
The pattern will be available for purchase on September the 1st

Yarn Substitution:
Choose a solid or only slightly variegated fingering weight (NZ 4 ply) yarn for this shawl in order to highlight the textural nature of the fabric produced.

Dandelion Stitch Sampler Shawl

I kinda forgot about this .... but it is so much fun to knit, that it's worth remembering!

Dandelion is a crescent shaped shawl made up of ten different stitch patterns embedded in a background of soothing stocking stitch, worked from the top down. You may not have encountered all these stitch patterns before, but they ARE fun to knit. I get bored easily, so I really enjoyed working each of the stitch patterns once only, and then moving on to the next one. Each stitch pattern is fully explained and the directions are completely written. There are some charts where they are useful, but you don't need to read a chart to complete this shawl.

I love the yarn - Madelinetosh Dandelion in Lepiodoptra and Forestry. The jewel like colours positively glow and complement each other well. Any solid, or semi-solid 4 ply / fingering weight yarn will work, and you will need about 210 and 230 metres (230 and 252 yards) of each colour.
It's available in my Ravelry store .... here.
Enjoy!

The Lace Eater

I've been working on a new shawl.
I call it Frankenshawl ...

I don't really, but laying out all my little swatches helped me to figure out size, and the rate of increases I needed along the neck edge, and generally whether it was worth continuing.

I had a few mishaps....

But I'm glad I stuck with it ...

Mad Blood

Mad Blood is finally available on Ravelry

I haven't blogged about it while I was working on it, because ... well, I totally forgot!

Mad Blood was inspired by the dramatic beauty of a local yarn: The Mad Blood Stirreth, dyed by Tash of Knitsch Sock fame. It's a gorgeous blue based ruby red with just a hint of pink. When I saw it I knew I had to do something dramatic with it - so I did. The shawl Mad Blood positively drips with lace, cables, beads (optional of course), and nupps. If you like your lace challenging, then this shawl will keep your attention as the lace motifs are worked on both right and wrong side rows.
If you're like me and you get bored easily, fear not - the lace and cable motifs are constantly changing - you are never asked to repeat a series of rows.

The development of this shawl took a while - I have many swatches as I worked out the pattern motifs. In a future post I will show you my rather frumpy looking knitted doodle swatches so you can see how I get from A to B.

This pink-red colour seems to be a challenging colour for digital cameras. We had an extremely difficult time trying to capture both the colour AND the pattern, and in the end the photos are a compromise between trying to achieve the illustration of both.

Ironically, my favourite photo is taken in a grubby mirror in a gloomy room with the shawl pinned to my leg. If you click on the photo you will be able to see the pin!

Dandelion

Poor Blog, I have forsaken you for the immediacy of Instagram.

And often I just don't have a lot to say.
I had to show you this little bit of pretty though.

A while ago my husband had to go to the Big Smoke (Wellington) for a week long conference. I begged him to go to an independent yarn shop located not far from his hotel. He declined, claiming that the air in yarn shops makes him sick/fall asleep. Bah - I gave up.
Then he came home with two skeins of this pretty, with the help from the lovely staff at Holland Road Yarn Co.,
It is Madelinetosh Dandelion (in Lepidoptra and Forestry), which I am turning into this ...

The colours are luminous, like jewels. Simply stunning. On close inspection the yarn looks like it has a halo of darker colour - I don't know if it actually does, or if it's a perceptual illusion, but it is certainly a fascinating yarn to use.

I wanted to make a special project, and thought it would be fun to try different stitch patterns I scoured from stitch dictionaries. So far so good, until something goes wrong, which it will do ... but then it will come right again.