Tag: YOTH

new collection: fog & frost

DiannaLeave a comment

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Some projects take longer than others to come to fruition, and over the past several years my self-publishing has definitely fallen by the wayside. When I started my master’s degree in 2015, I had limited time to work on new designs, and as I started working with Quince & Co. around the same time, the majority of my designing time went to those patterns, or patterns for other third parties. Consequently I’ve had this collection on the back burner for years, visiting the patterns and working on them here and there, whenever I had a spare moment. So I’m positively thrilled to finally share Fog & Frost with the world: five new patterns inspired by the Norwegian landscape.

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The inspiration for this collection is actually quite easy for me to pinpoint: in the summer of 2014 I spent two months in Oslo, and my friend Camilla and I went on a road trip over to the western part of the country, known as Vestlandet. The drive is a beautiful one, and the landscape once you reach that part of the country is gorgeous as well, and I took many, many photos. The photo above was taken somewhere near Flåm, and I love the deep, moody hues. The same goes for the following photo, taken in Hallingdal on the drive back:

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It has the bonus of reminding me of the Snoqualmie Valley in western Washington state, where Tolt Yarn and Wool is located.

The photos from this trip planted the seed of the idea for this collection. Most of the pieces existed in some form or another, even if only as design ideas/sketches/swatches, before that trip. The photos and the idea for a collection became the motivation to finish some of those back burner designs.

The collection features two pullovers with colorwork yokes, a hat, a pair each of fingerless mitts and full mittens, and a lightweight cowl. The palette was deliberately chosen to evoke the feeling the inspiration photos gave me. I thought I’d share a little bit about each piece here on the blog, because I love the way the pieces in this collection show that ideas sometimes morph by the time they’re finished pieces, and that while our original plans for ideas don’t always pan out, taking them in new directions can lead to really cool results.

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Mountain Hum began its life as a submission to Pom Pom Quarterly. Designers who submit to third party publications or collections always end up with more ideas that don’t get picked than ideas that do, and it’s satisfying to find a new home for some of those ideas. This was originally a sub for the spring 2015 issue of Pom Pom, which was issue 12. The mood for that issue was inspired by Scandinavian minimalism, and while this sweater didn’t get picked, my Swedish Pancakes mitts did make it into that issue. When I first sketched this design, I imagined it in the Quince & Co. Finch, and the motif was simpler.

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The design inspiration was consequently slightly more obvious, as well! By 2015 I’d realized that a yoke like this would look gorgeous in the color-shifting Spincyle Yarns Dyed in the Wool, and I opted to pair it with YOTH Little Brother, a fingering-weight merino/cashmere/nylon blend. I decided to modify the chart at this fingering-weight gauge, in order to avoid super long floats between each petal motif. I love where this sweater ended up and it seems like you all do too, because this has been the resounding favorite of the collection since I started sharing teasers on Instagram.

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The other sweater actually also began its life as a Pom Pom submission, although it evolved significantly more than Mountain Hum. Polar Night was originally imagined as a single-color yoked pullover with metallic embroidery on the yoke! The submission was for the autumn 2015 issue, and as it turns out, that ended up being one of my all-time favorite issues of Pom Pom (and it still is). So it worked out in the end!

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While I still like the embroidery idea, I decided to scrap that and come up with a colorwork motif instead – and once I started playing around with charts, the ideas continued to morph and change, as they do. I considered a lot of different yarns for this one as well, swatching different options before finally landing on Magpie Fibers Domestic Worsted, which I brought home from Rhinebeck last fall. I played with shaping on this sweater, too – while the body doesn’t feature any waist shaping, I decided to combine raglan shaping with circular yoke shaping for the yoke of the sweater.

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The pattern that spent the longest time on the back burner was West Wind, which features two versions of mittens with traveling twisted stitchs (fingerless and a full mitten). I wrote this pattern back in early 2014, knit and photographed samples, had it tech edited and basically ready to release, and then decided I needed to tweak the position of the thumb placement (and on top of that the dyer of the original yarn I used stopped dyeing). I put it on the back burner, where it stayed for awhile. Once I had the idea for the collection in 2015, I decided this pattern would be a good fit, and since they were worked up in DK weight yarn, YOTH Big Sister was a perfect fit.

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I decided a hat that featured the same motifs as West Wind would be nice, so I came up with an alternating all-over pattern using the motif. Since this is a hat covered in twisted rib, essentially, I wanted to use a springy yarn with really good memory, so I opted to go for non-superwash for this pattern (in my experience, superwash rib tends to stretch out over time and not bounce back very well). Quince & Co. Chickadee was my top choice for that, and I’m so pleased with how it turned out. I love that it coordinates with the mitts/mittens without being a perfect match.

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The last pattern in the collection was partly an excuse to play with crochet. I took a crocheted motifs workshop with the Shibaguyz at Knit Fit (sadly now defunct) in Seattle several years ago, and I fell in love with modular motifs after that. North Wind combines three different hexagonal/six-pointed motifs (two of each) with a scarf knitted on the bais, so that a long lightweight loop is formed when you join the pieces. I worked it up in two colors of Schoppel-Wolle IN Silk, but there’s a ton of creative potential with the motifs – you could work each one in a different color, or use multiple colors per motif, or even make a completely monochromatic version using one color for both the knitting and the crochet. I think many of us who are primarily knitters have dabbled in crochet and have expressed our desire to bring more crochet into our lives. So I hope that this helps with that, and I hope it means there’s more crochet on the horizon for me!

I had fun shooting these photos, which felt like a unique challenge. This collection was in progress when I moved to Norway in 2015, and given the inspiration, I had definitely planned on shooting the pieces there before third-party work kept pushing this collection to the side. By the time we left Norway, I’d yet to finish (or even start) all of the pieces and so it was pretty clear that I wouldn’t be able to shoot in Norway after all. I was pretty committed to the original inspiration photos, though, and eventually I realized that I could have photo backdrops printed – and so that is what I did.

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My hope is that the incorporation of the backdrops helps give the photos the feeling that I get from seeing the original inspiration photos – it’s definitely not an attempt to make it look like I’m “in” Norway, but rather a way to bring a mood to the collection photos, one that’s more interesting than simply seeing the pieces in front of a blank wall. I’ve had a lot of fun bringing all the pieces of this collection together over the past couple of months, and I am incredibly grateful to my tech editor, my test knitters, and my friends and colleagues who’ve provided feedback and help along the way.

I’ll wrap up with just a couple more photos from that road trip back in 2014. Thanks for reading, and I hope you like this new collection!

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Me in Voss, 2014

project planning

DiannaLeave a comment

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I’m a big fan of Karen Templer’s Queue Check posts over at Fringe, and if I’m honest it’s prompted me to assess the state of my own knitting queue with an eye towards prioritization and realistic expectations. (That sentence may be one of the least romantic things I’ve ever written about knitting on this blog, but I know some of you out there can relate – with perpetual startitis and too many projects on the needles at once.) Looking at my actual planned projects with a practical eye is one of those things that helps inspire me to knit the things I really want to knit, and that I really want to wear.

The other thing prompting me to think this way about my knitting has been coming to terms with the state of my yarn stash over the past year after moving into a 500 square foot apartment with my husband. There’s a lot of yarn that I’m frankly never going to get to, especially as I continue acquiring new and exciting Norwegian yarns that I want to explore and share. But I’d also really like to find the stuff in my stash that I can use to make the things I want, so I’m thinking about pattern choices, yarns, and project timelines much more critically than I used to. I know I will still occasionally throw caution to the wind and cast on something new that gets me excited – but it’s way more awesome when that happens because I’ve finally found the right pattern for that skein of laceweight yarn I bought several years ago (I’m looking at you, Loess). That kind of experience is great. So I’m moving toward an approach that allows room for that, but that also has some more structure than I typically employ now.

At the moment, I’ve got 13 projects on Ravelry listed as WIPs. While I know people with far more than that, I sometimes get jealous of the monogamous knitters who stick with one (or maybe two) projects at a time. Even though I’m already planning future projects, I know I’d like to work my way through finishing up some of these existing ones first. Some are close – a pair of mittens that only needs thumbs, for example, or small projects that come in pairs (mitts, socks) where the first of a pair just needs its mate. Some are larger, like the Sandneskofte I’m knitting in Buachaille (pictured above). I think at this point that I actually find the prioritizing pretty easy, but sticking to my plan is the hard part. So in the interest of trying to hold myself to some sort of plan as well as actually sharing some projects-in-progress on the blog, here’s a sort of State of the Knitting Address.

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Short term goals include finishing the thumbs on these Hugin and Munin mittens in Rauma Finullgarn. This should be the easiest thing in my WIP pile, but the catch is that I designed these myself (the ravens come from my university’s seal) and I haven’t actually charted the thumbs yet (oops). Once I sit down and decide on the charts, however, I should be able to knock these out super quick. And then I can wear them! Hooray! I definitely don’t want to go another winter with these as a nearly-done WIP.

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I’d also like to wrap up my Inglis Mitts in Ysolda’s Blend No. 1 relatively soon, because they’re going to be really useful in just a few short weeks. In fact, I expect September and October to be prime time for these mitts, and if I don’t have them done by then they won’t really be useful again until spring. No time to waste!

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Lastly, I’d like to wrap up the Dunaway scarf I’ve started for my husband in time for him to wear it before the weather gets really cold; and I’d like to finish my Sandneskofte (pictured at top) in time to wear to the Oslo Strikkefestival in November. Dunaway is lovely mindless knitting, perfect for TV and movie-watching, and the Sandneskofte is actually farther along than that photo shows (I’m at the point, in fact, where I need to decide whether or not I’d like to make it a V-neck). That makes these goals all feel relatively achievable in the next couple of months, even though they’re going to be busy. As long as I stick to the plan!

Is your queue out of control or do you like to stick with one project at a time? Do you have project management strategies when you want to knit all the things? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

knit fit!

DiannaLeave a comment

The second weekend in November was this year’s Knit Fit! While I didn’t have a market booth this year, I did end up attending both Friday (opening night) and Saturday. It was quite a lot of fun to simply go as a student and not be working for the weekend!

For those who don’t know, Knit Fit is a local knit & crochet event here in Seattle, held in November. I think this was the third year, so it’s still a new-ish event, but it gets better every year and I’m so proud of the organizers for the weekend they put together. The weekend is made up of an opening night talk on Friday evening followed by two days of wonderful classes on Saturday and Sunday. There’s also a marketplace full of fantastic independent vendors that runs both Saturday and Sunday, and this year’s was bigger and better than ever.

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I specifically wanted to mention the opening night talk this year – given by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, linguist, anthropologist, and textile expert (I swooned a little bit the first time I read that). You may have heard of some of her works, such as Prehistoric Textiles, THE book on prehistoric textiles, or Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. I had heard of these works, but never read them, and I’m currently about two thirds of the way through Women’s Work (which is fantastic, for the record). I was very excited to hear her speak and despite a few technical hiccups, I still really enjoyed her wonderful talk. If you ever get a chance to go see her speak, you should do it! Barber is one of the people credited with bringing this type of textile-related anthropological work to the forefront, and focusing on women’s roles in ancient societies (due to the nature of textiles, they tend to decompose, so the physical remnants of that section of society is harder to trace and was thus largely ignored by early archeology).

1ccab32311330c46-knitfithaulcroppedFrom left to right: YOTH Big Sister in Blueberry and Olive, Farm Girl Products BFL/alpaca, Three Fates Yarns Superwash Worsted in Commuter

On Saturday I took a crochet class with Shibaguyz, which was a lot of fun and I learned quite a bit. A visit to the market took me to the booths of many of my favorite yarnies, including Spincycle and Jorstad Creek, and I picked up some new-to-me yarns as well from both YOTH and Farm Girl Products. The YOTH booth was incredible! But the beautiful grey BFL/alpaca blend I picked up from Farm Girl might be what I’m most excited about.

I also did Game Knitting for the first time. Game Knitting is the brainchild of Lee Meredith and the easiest way to explain it is to say that it’s kind of like a drinking game, but with knitting, not drinking. You queue up a film or TV show with a list of suitable cues on hand, as if you were going to play a drinking game. You pick an item to knit during the game (something simple, like a hat, a cowl, a scarf, etc) and you pick a variation – that is, a characteristic that you change whenever you reach a cue in the film/show. In the simplest version, you switch from knit stitch to purl stitch or from purl to knit whenever you reach a cue, so your knitted item would be made up of a random pattern of knit lines and purl lines. It’s a really fantastic concept, and the sky’s truly the limit. For Game Fitting at Knit Fit, they like to show a Seattle-related movie, and this year’s was Ten Things I Hate About You, which I hadn’t seen in ages, so it was a lot of fun.

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Because I am a crazy person, I decided I would work all knit stitches, but I would change colors every time we hit a cue. Many of the stretches of knitting between cues were really too long for stranding (and I knew going in that they would be), so that basically meant that rather than stranding, I just had a literal rat’s nest of ends to weave in after the fact. Fortunately, I like weaving in ends, so it worked out. I used Heirloom Romney and managed to get most of the hat knit during the movie, and then finished it off later on with a big stretch of red followed by a stretch of the undyed off-white (which isn’t really visible in this photo). In the spirit of Game Knitting, there’s no shaping on the hat; instead, I did a 3-needle bind off and stitched the two corners together, topping it all off with a jaunty pom pom. I’m excited that Game Knitting yielded a hat that is super wearable and absolutely unique!

On top of all of that, one of the most fun things about events like this is getting to hang out with so many fiber industry folks all at once – since for so many of us, especially designers, so much of our work is very solitary. Aside from the aforementioned yarnies, it was fun to see Kathy Cadigan, Andi Satterlund, Andrea Rangel (who was down from Canada to teach), Lee Meredith (up from Portland), and others.

If you’re interested in learning more about Knit Fit, you should head to the website and read up! And perhaps put it on the calendar for next year – it’s usually the first or second weekend in November, but keep an eye on the website for exact dates. And congrats to the Knit Fit crew on another wonderful year!