Have you ever knit something that pushed you out of your comfort zone, and been so glad you did it?
My latest pattern, the Tesselis Shawl, is like that for me. Not because it’s a hard project, because it’s actually a potato chip knit. Simple lace, easy textures, and a few rows of slipped stitches sounds like a relaxing evening, right? So what was so scary?
It’s one of the easiest tricks in a knitter’s toolkit. We’ve all done it, probably in those curling stockinette scarves we made when we were first starting out. It’s—get ready for it—drumroll…
Color blocking.
You heard that right. I was scared of giant stripes.
When Jensen of Sugarplum Circus suggested doing a 3-color design for the second shawl in our ebook collab Encircle: Half Pi Shawls (more on that later), I immediately said “yes”, because who wouldn’t want to use as many of her stunning colorways as possible? But I promptly got cold feet. Since the fabric needs to be flexible in order to block properly, half-pi construction doesn’t work well with large swaths of stranded colorwork, my go-to when it comes to using multiple colors. Ditto for mosaic knitting. Jensen and I had already decided to avoid brioche for this collection, so that left me with striping. And because thin stripes don’t get along well with lace, they had to be big stripes.
For some reason I’d always had it in my head that color blocking was for bold, graphic, modern designs; which, while very cool, isn’t really my design aesthetic. And deep down, I was having lurid visions of those color blocked stockinette scarves—that was definitely not the look I was going for.
But because I’d already said I would do it, I buckled down and did the thing. I found an inspiration base—ancient Greek mosaics, in this case. I applied all the same rules of thumb I use when designing anything else: proportion, repetition, variation, contrast, and so on. I flubbed up some math and had to restart. I also had to improvise a lot because I wasn’t sure how some things would play until I saw them knit up. And the Tesselis Shawl is the result.
Now that wasn’t so bad, right?
Looking back, I have no idea why this scared me so much and I’m in love with the exuberance that is this three-skein, color blocked, textural shawl that’s so much easier to knit than it looks. I even have a color palette picked out to maybe make another…so lesson learned: Go to town! Sometimes doing the thing you think won’t work pays off. You might just get a new favorite shawl out of it.
If you fancy trying some color blocking…
Tesselis is now available on Ravelry and Payhip! The code MOSAICS15 will get you 15% off until midnight EST on November 11, so be sure to grab it before then. (If you’re on my email newsletter, there’s already a special coupon code waiting for you in your inbox—or you can sign up now, since I’ll be sending that code out again November 10.)
And to get your own color block party started, be sure to grab three skeins of Charlotte Fingering from Sugarplum Circus! Nobody does rich, layered tonals like Jensen, and her Charlotte base has an amazing sheen and drape.
Now, what’s this about an ebook? Tesselis is the second shawl in Encircle: Half Pi Shawls, a collection I’ve been collaborating on this year with Jensen. Purchasing the ebook will get you Tesselis, Aetherios (the cover design) and a yet-to-be revealed third design coming later this winter, all at a special discounted price. So if you’d like to have as many half-pi shawls in your life as possible, this option is for you!
So if nothing else, I hope this post inspires you to try something that you’re scared of. To set the inner kid free and let yourself just have fun with a project, regardless of the results. You might end up really loving them; and either way, it’ll be fun. With that, I’m going to run off and daydream about some more Tesselis color palettes…one thing’s for sure, I’ll never let color blocking scare me again.
