Colorwork

It's a gray, rainy day here, with temperatures in the 50s, which makes me think of pulling out the winter clothes and finally putting away summer things.

I've wanted to do stranded colorwork knitting for a long time, but it seemed so intimidating for some reason. In an early attempt (a baby blanket based on this pattern) I carefully twisted the yarns where colors changed to prevent holes. In a later attempt (my Spectra by Stephen West) I tried to follow the directions for picking up the color change from beneath the working yarn to prevent holes at the color change. Sometimes I did it correctly, and sometimes . . . not.

This summer I bit the bullet and tried again with a really cute (and free!) little pattern from Churchmouse Yarns & Teas. I made the Houndstooth Cuffs with navy and gray Palette yarn from Knit Picks. I finally wrapped my head around picking up the yarn from beneath for the color change and loved the finished product. A woman who was selling cuffs at a craft show told me that research showed that keeping your wrists warm where the blood vessels are close to the surface can help keep you warmer. Sounds reasonable to me -- and cuffs are small projects that knit up fast. They could be my new favorite project.

With the success of the cuffs, I forged ahead with another colorwork pattern -- the Chromaticity Cowl by Miriam L. Felton. This is also in Knit Picks Palette. It was a lot of fun picking out the colors. I loved the result, but I didn't really look hard at the pattern before I bought it. It features several rows where the color blocks change in which you knit with three colors of yarn. Yikes! What a mess that was untangling the twisted strands! But there were no holes at the color changes and my floats inside look OK, so I am happy. It was a bit of a challenge, but I really want to do more.

I confess: several years ago, in a burst of enthusiasm for colorwork, I bought one ball of each of the Knit Picks Palette colors then available, so all of this was knit from stash. It's what I wanted to do when I bought the yarn, and now I am doing it. There's more colorwork in my future.

But right now, I am still knitting on my Hitchhiker in lace weight yarn.

It's great TV knitting and I've got nearly 40 points on the serrated edge. I'll have to hold it up to my fingering weight Hitchhiker soon to see how much more knitting I have to do. The pink and orange stripe is very subtle (but the color is not). I love how it is turning out.