Originally posted March 31, 2006
This has nothing to do with Spring allergies. I just thought that the picture of Snowdrops in the earlier post wasn’t up to “snuff.” It didn’t really capture the “essence” of Snowdrops – whatever that might be, so I took a few pictures of other more sheltered clumps around the garden and came up with these.
I also tried my hand at some intarsia Snowdrops. I was trying to work out a stitch pattern that would “scream” Snowdrops. Now this a little difficult to do when one is still trying to develop one’s artistic skills.
However, after working out a few graphs, I came up with these as a first attempt. I didn’t like the black backgound and I became hopelessly entangled in the three colour carries, I had created for myself – yikes!
Back to the graph paper. This time I decided to do two colour carries and add the flowers with duplicate stitch afterwards. You can do this. I read it once somewhere in a book; maybe by Nicky Epstein, not sure; but it is not “cheating.”
I used a fingering weight cotton yarn in 3 colours – blue, green and white and knit on 2.25mm needles until I lost one of the needles. Fortunatlely I was almost finished the sample. Now I have to buy a new set of needles or take the seats out of my car to find one 14″, 2.25mm needle. Where could it go in a Honda Civic?
Anyway, I am a little happier with this clump which I think might look nice on a bag or scattered over a hat or maybe even a sweater. I even graphed out an idea in fair isle using Snowdrops. I’ll let you know how it works out.
Now this might seem like a short post. That’s because it does not take into account the 4 hours I spent this morning learning that I could not import a graph done in a table format with any of the cute little endings that they give you to try. Nor does it take into account the hour or so I spent trying to find my Stitch Painter discs, loading in the program, relearning the program – read several failed graphs and lots of re-entering small little dashes and X’s. I won’t mention the knitting and re-knitting of the swatch, because that was actually fun – well the 3 colour carries weren’t, but the rest was.
I did this because I am in avoidance mode. I still have lots of patterns to enter into the new website format for Infiknit and I am trying to find other more pressing things to do than that.
Here is the graph. The background is blue. The X’s are white and the “/” are green. Please let me know if you try it. I think that it could work in any weight of yarn.
My husband, of course, just announced yesterday that there were lots of Crocuses (I know it’s Croci, but I prefer Crocuses) up. Better buy some new needles and get busy. How does a Choir of Crocus sound?
Enjoy Carol