Colorwork Frenzy

Don’t ask me why, but right now I seem to think it’s a good idea to have a thousand balls of yarn hanging off my work at once. I tend to go through spurts—last winter it was lace projects; right now it’s colorwork of all kinds.

Even though Facets has been published for several months, I didn’t actually finish the last few rows of mine until a couple of weeks ago, when I created the jogging tutorial. It’s such easy striping that it almost doesn’t feel like colorwork, but alternating colors every other rows keeps it exciting even though I could do the pattern in my sleep.

This is a quick little personal project done with mosaic knitting. In retrospect, knitting a circumference of six inches with three colors on four (slippery) double-pointed needles wasn’t the wisest move I ever made, but miraculously I’m still alive. The afterthought thumb was a real life-saver in that department. Perhaps one of these days I’ll write up a pattern; but at the moment, I’m just looking forward to handing these off to their eight-year-old recipient! (She’s the only person on earth who could have gotten me to work with hot pink and speckles in the same project!)

Last year I discovered tapestry crochet, and I must say, I’m hooked! (Pun very much intended.) I love how floats can be carried for far, far longer than is possible or wise to carry them in knitted colorwork, and how neat the backside looks. I am sworn to secrecy about this project now, but keep an eye out for it this coming winter.

Sunday evening I cast on a Soldotna for a dear friend. As you can see, I’ve only worked with three colors so far (this photo is from Monday morning); the fourth color is a beautiful dusty purple that should pop nicely against the blues. My friend chose Andorra from Kelbourne Woolens, and the fabric is working up to be incredibly light and soft.

One of my favorite things about this project so far has been getting to practice my two-handed stranded knitting (Felicia Lo Wong has a great tutorial here). I’m working on a short circular rather than doing Magic Loop as she does in the video, as I tend to pull the floats too tight wherever there’s a jump to work on the other side of the needle. I’m anticipating lots of fun ahead—updates forthcoming!

I actually used two-handed stranding for the first time on this project, which is finished now; it was also the first time I’d done a colorwork project with consistent color dominance, and I have to say that the results are pretty stunning. This is a sample which was mailed off to the publisher yesterday (and no, I can’t say any more than that!)

Phew! That’s a lot of yarn, even for me. I guess I was asking to get myself in a tangle…