Maakin Progress

Maakin = knitting in Shetland dialect

Having fully embraced the power of folding a rectangle of knitted fabric into a poncho, I have recently started to make another Fair Isle project.  The first Fair Isle poncho that I made was a product of many false starts, so it is rather satisfying to be making one that is intentional.  I have a framework for the entire project, although I didn't go as far as to actually write a pattern.  I do have a drawing that shows the sequence of Fair Isle motifs.

The numbers refer to motifs from Mary Jane Mucklestone's book.

The design is intentional and reflects traditional Fair Isle knitting in the combination of motifs. These techniques are clearly described in Mucklestone's book 200 Fair Isle Motifs, A Knitter's Directory. The same few Peerie (small) motifs alternate with larger border patterns.  Also, the backgrounds alternate from light to dark.  I wanted to arrange each large motif so that the Os of one motif appeared above the Xs of the previous motif. I made this task possible by choosing motifs with repeats of 7, 14, or 28 stitches. This isn't a traditional Fair Isle design element, but the border patterns get increasingly larger, ranging from 9-19 rows.  One last design element: the background for the current motif is one of the colors from the center row of the previous motif.

The color choices were also intentional.  I chose colors that I had on hand, and then purchased more yarn from J&S Wool Brokers.  

The deep orange is the main color of the poncho.  Once I finish the Fair Isle section, I'll use that color to work some basic Shetland lace. I'm about 1/3 the way finished with the Fair Isle section.

Each row has 206 stitches; long enough to get into a rhythm, short enough to stay engaged.

This shot shows the steek. 
Also, the Xs of one large motif are arranged above the Os of the previous large motif.

Finally Finished

I started a Fair Isle project about 2 (?) years ago, using a knitting machine and a cone of J&S Shetland wool to make panels that would fit together and form the back and sides of a cardigan with asymmetrical front openings. One opening would be lace, and the other would be Fair Isle designs.  I did finish that "sweater" but the concept in my head did not in any way translate as a functioning garment.  It got put away until enough time went by for me to face its deconstruction.  

A few months ago Oogy and I embarked on a knit-a-long to make Pinions, which was enormously fun to knit and yielded wearable garments. We were inspired to make up our own version, which we are calling Rogue Pinions.  We're maintaining a good pace, each of us contributing 2 "clues", one week after the other.  Here is my RP so far:

A close-up of #5 and 6, clues from Oogy that were especially fun to knit.

The success of Pinions had another impact: I found the abandoned failed Fair Isle/Shetland lace "sweater" and began is deconstruction, removing the sleeves, shoulders, and neck until all that was left was a long rectangle with two openings of live stitches where the sleeves had been.  Those got kitchenered, and one side of the rectangle got partially seamed to create a poncho.

The fair isle motifs are from M.J. Mucklestone's book 200 Fair Isle Motifs, and the lace portions are from Lovick's book The Magic of Shetland Lace Knitting.  The yarn is J&S 2-ply jumper weight.

FC58 is one of my favorite colors of J&S 2-ply

Most certainly going to wear this a lot!!!

A Second Pinion

Casapinka's Pinion was so much fun to knit that Oogy and I have decided to do another one.  And this time, we plan to choose our own patterns for each section.  Going rogue!  We'll alternate the job of choosing the patterns, and there is the option to add some narrative, i.e. a pinion.  Oogy's getting us started, and I already have my first patterns planned out!

Here is the yarn I'm using:

A few hand-dyed skeins, some that were purchased for other projects that never materialized, and a few leftovers.

Here is my first Pinion:

There's probably enough fingering-weight yarn to do a few more, but I'm beginning to wonder if this might be a good fate for the large collection of DK/sport-wt yarn...

Mitts Finished

 

Pinion Break: Da Meids Mitts

Last week a knitting pal shared her plans to make Katie's Kep, a Fair Isle hat from the 2020 Shetland Wool Week annual.  I got intensely jealous, which led me to set aside the Pinions project at Pinion 15 and make a Fair Isle project.  

Pictured on the cover of the 2021 Annual, Da Meids Mitts by Alison Rendall seemed like a good candidate to consider.  I was delighted that there were three colorways, all using Uradale Yarns Organic Native Shetland Wool.  I have curated a small collection of their yarn from both online and in-person purchases, and felt confident that I would have enough of each color to make one of the three designs.  I love working with this yarn because it has a rustic, natural appearance.

Turns out I did not have enough yarn in the designated colors.  I thought I might substitute in some other shetland yarns, but in the end decided to modify the color combinations.  We'll call it Colorway Four.

Combining colors in Fair Isle projects is a skill that I am still developing.  I made some important progress in this effort last fall when I took Tracey Doxie's color blending workshop during Wool Week, and then a follow-up workshop with her several weeks later.  For Colorway Four I opted to use three background shades, going from light to dark: Slett, Laebrakk, and Moorit.  The foreground colors were Ling Heath, Sea Pink, and Flukkra, going from dark to light.  I used Tormentil Heath for the lace cuff and the "singing" line at the center of the front Fair Isle pattern.  I normally use the same light-dark direction for back- and foreground, but I realized for this project that I need to exaggerate the contrasts between them to make the colors I had on hand work in the design. 

A strategy for blending colors and ensuring adequate contrast between back and foreground is to view the yarn choices through your camera's monochromatic setting. Here we can see that Sea Pink and Laebrakk are very close together, so I opted to minimize how much they were used in the same rows.

The advice we all hear and often disregard is to make a swatch.  The benefit of the swatch was hugely emphasized in Tracey's workshop, and I did consider doing one for this project.  However, any swatch I would have made would be the same size as the mitts, so I just went for it.  I knew I could tear it back and make some adjustments, although I decided I was happy with the original plan for Colorway Four.

I had some help finishing the first mitt.  

Alison Rendall suggests drying the mitts on a glove board, reminding me that I had acquired a set of these during one of my visits to the Shetland Textile Museum.  I'm using them upside down in an effort to block the lace and not stretch out the ribbing at the top of the mitt.

On to mitt two!

Another Update

As much fun as knitting Pinions has been, I have allowed myself to get derailed twice, so I'm still at Pinion 9.  

I liked Pinion 7 enough to add a variation of it to another work in progress. More about this later.

Then, I really liked Pinion 9 and got inspired to start another project.  I have lots of this yarn, so I'm thinking it will be a lacy sweater with this design for the sleeves.  It's only at the conceptual level now.  What I find most appealing is the lace effect between the double decreases.

I expect to be heading off on other tangents before Pinion is done!

Pinions KAL Update

It's been fun to use up some yarn that I dyed over 10 years ago.  I just finished Pinion 6.

A late knitted Christmas gift idea has emerged and will keep me occupied, probably until people are opening presents and wondering where I am on Saturday.  Pinion 7 will have to wait a few days!

Another KAL

December is not the ideal time to start a 20-section fingering-weight knit along shawl ("Pinions"; thank you Sharon from Security and Casapinka). I was convinced to do it when I learned it was going to be folded into a poncho shape. I have accumulated a massive quantity of fingering-weight yarn and am short on ideas for what to do with the small quantities of so many different colors.  

I wish I could say this was all of it...

But once I organized the pile into general color groups, I was able to envision how some of the yarn could get put together.  

Brownie is not impressed, but is rather annoyed that so much of his bed space is occupied.  I won't tell him that I'm knitting a project that was designed by another cat.

I opted for the greens.  If I have enough fun with those, I might make two shawls.  Or, I could wait a short time until Casapinka generates yet another awesome use of colorful fingering-weight yarn.

What's Hap?

As part of my longstanding appreciation for Shetland knitting, I have attempted to make a hap with DK weight yarn that I purchased from Bee Croft, the online shop of a crofter on Fair Isle. Having followed barkland_croft on Instagram for the last few years, and meeting the crofter, Rachel, at a knitting group in Lerwick in 2019,  I was delighted to learn that she is producing yarn from her Shetland sheep flock and did not hesitate to order a skein of each solid color (Barnacle, Butterscotch, and Busby) as soon as it was available.  After about a month of wool huffing, fretting about my inability to keep Old Shale on track (please don't look closely), and wondering if I would have enough yarn to finish the lace edging, a hap emerged. 

The challenge in designing the hap was to make sure I would be able to use as much of the yarn as possible on each layer.  I initially mapped the pattern out on graph paper and aimed to have equal amounts of area for each color, but lace has a mind of its own, and I had to use my best judgement as the hap grew. 

All that's left of my skeins of Busby, Butterscotch, and Barnacle.

It is only appropriate that this hap will get used regularly.  That's what I find so appealing about this Shetland lace tradition: it's EVERYDAY lace.

 

Color blending update

I got busy with swatching after the Shetland Wool Week workshop with Tracey Doxey.  A follow-up workshop is scheduled this weekend, and these are some images of the swatches and projects I completed since the first workshop to show at this next meeting.  

I finished the first hat, and it has now reached its recipient.  Just in time for our daytime temperatures to get back to 70 degrees!

I made a second swatch using another combination of neutral and botanically-inspired colors.

This did not get translated into a hat, yet.  I was not happy with the swatch, but when I showed it to the Camel Knitters they were all impressed.  Which of the three combos do you like best?

I opted instead to go back to my Lerwick Flower Park design and used some of the same neutrals and greens for that.  Both the swatch and the hat are made with Uradale wool from Shetland. 

There's a third swatch:

Which I used as inspiration for this hat:

Since I finished these items, I've been focused on using my Bee Croft acquisition of three skeins of DK weight in natural colors which are named after some of the sheep: Barnacle, Butterscotch, and Busby.

From top to bottom: Broken Acre in Barnacle, Old Shale in Butterscotch, and Vandyke Lace in Busby.  

It's a massive project that I hope will serve as a hap when it's done.  It's so big now that I can't conceal it under the computer camera and it won't fit into my school bag, so I've had to use other knitting for all those Zoom meetings!  Making lace in DK weight yarn is a bit unconventional, but I expect that it will look much better when it's blocked.  I only swatched the center pattern, and it looks great, so let's hope blocking does its magic on the other sections, too.

I hope that your knitting projects are going well and keeping you happy!

Color Combos

Shetland Wool Week (Sept 25-Oct 3) is over, but it is having a lasting impact for me.  I participated in two workshops, one for weaving and the other on color blending in Fair Isle knitting.  Here is why I needed to participate in the color blending workshop:

I choose colors I like together, but I'm not good at organizing them so that you can actually see the pattern.  The challenge is to have enough contrast, but also be able to blend the color changes so that they are not too drastic.  This hat is a real mess! 

In the workshop led by Tracey Doxey, we were encouraged to swatch.  I'm not a fan of swatching, but I will admit that it is better than getting half-way through a hat that totally sucks.

So here's the swatch.  I applied what I learned in the workshop to the same colors that I used in the failed hat, and the pattern is clear.  I decided that I liked the different combination at the top of the swatch, which included the colors next to it.  The key is to have ample contrast between the light and dark colors.  Sometimes the actual color is deceiving, so that makes it tricky.  We learned some strategies in the workshop for dealing with that.  

So I got another hat started and decided to ditch the rose color.  I didn't do another swatch, but it's looking rather good. 

The workshop has given me a renewed enthusiasm for designing Fair Isle projects, and luckily I have accumulated a large collection of colors to play with.  Plus, J&S Wool Brokers online shop is just a few clicks away!

I'm not the only fan of J&S.  My assistant seems to be a big fan of shade FC46mix.

Escaping the Oppressive Heat

Once again, the library is a sanctuary.  When we were kids living in Scottsdale, AZ, my little brother and I would go to the public library after school, and anytime during the summer, because it was cool inside and there was a chess set that took up a whole large table, with pieces that required two hands to move.  A shelf nearby contained the complete collection of Nancy Drew mysteries.  It did not take long for my 13-year-old self to devour those.  I tried a few Hardy Boys, but found them lacking.  Onto Shelley’s Frankenstein and Dumas’s d’Artagnan romances.  I especially loved The Man in the Iron Mask. 

Fast forward a few decades and my little brother and I are helping take care of a house in the northern reaches of Vermont.  It is generally cool here, but this week I am staying here under a heat dome that is also a humidity dome.  Usually, this place is so windy that you need to make sure your hat has a chin strap.  Not so much this week.  The original owner (in our family at least) of this house was my great aunt, and I never understood why on some summer days she would close the house up in the morning.  I understand that now.  It’s better to have fans blowing 78 degrees around instead of the intermittent breeze blowing 90 degrees around.  

That strategy failed today: it was 80+ in the house by 3 pm, and I was worried I would ruin my computer with sweat dripping onto the keyboard.  

There is a local library that opened a few years ago that I’ve been meaning to “check out”.  I made my way there today in hopes of some air-conditioned air.  Oh, did I score! I found a table, after asking the lone librarian if there was one where I could work.  Another patron brought a desk chair over to the table, and there I sat for about 2 hours, under the world’s strongest air-conditioning vent. No one has appreciated the flow of air more than I.  And then, while I was toiling away, there was a strong thunderstorm, which not only washed my very filthy north-country dirt-road-soot-coated vehicle, but it reduced the temperature by about 10 degrees.  I was able to return to the house and open windows to the newly cooled air. And, I have library books to inspire more crafting!

 

Bright Adventure

Oogy started organizing an annual Dyeing Extravaganza when she moved to the country.  The idea was to get a few of us together for a weekend of spinning, dyeing, knitting, eating, drinking, etc.  The first year was awesome in person, and then we went remote because of COVID last year, and this year, too.  For this year's event we opted for a palette of neon bright colors.  This idea may have started as a way to celebrate Pride month, but it took hold because we all need some brightness after 18 months of dealing with this pandemic.  

It was very exciting to try dyeing a new fiber: Zebra

We chose PRO WashFast Acid dyes in colors: flavine yellow, hot pink, brilliant blue, brilliant violet, key lime, and bright orange.

We also had long tubes of sock yarn that Oogy made with her sock machine, and a few mini skeins to use for toes and heels.

We each set up our dye studios and for 2 hours had a blast on Zoom trying new ways to apply dye to the wool.  Here are my results:

The sock tubes were a new challenge!

I'm looking forward to working with these bright colors!