Shaped

Colourwork is one of my favorite kinds of knitting, well stranded colour work, the kind with a rhythm. Typically that kind of colourwork is pixelated, each stitch worked in one of the colours of the project. Typically that means that knitted colourwork patterns are a little jagged, somewhat pixelated. Yesterday I finished a project, a hot water bottle that make use of a slightly different kind of colourwork - one inspired by lace. In lace curved shapes are created using pairs of increases and decreases - I've sometimes wondered why the same shaping isn't used in colourwork.

 

Here is the project in process, well nearly finished. In this case the colourwork is fairly simple 2x2 vertical banding forming a suggestion of grass or growing stems, with one single bud standing above. This bud was worked in a kind of intarsia (shock horror - but it was only ten or so rows so I handled it). I used the cut thread trick, instead of working the instrasia from the ball - I cut the yarn about 2m long, and at the end or beginning of each round simply pulled the cut yarn free of any tangles.

This was also worked as intarsia in the round - simply as there was only one bud, it could have been worked as stranded if the buds had repeated. The small size of the bud, only eight stitches across, meant I could strand across the back. Shaping the bud with pairs of increases and decreases, so the total stitch count stayed the same makes the edges smooth. There was some fudging to pull the edge stitches firm - and adjust the yarns so the work stayed flat. Although if the background yarns are pulled to tight behind the work - th bud becomes slightly raised - in this case not a problem.

And finished, with an Icord, and bulb ends, these were worked again with increases and decreases.

Pattern in the works. As soon as important school holiday activities like marbling nail polish has been done, younger cub is now in a school uniform so such things can only happen in the holidays. Update soon.

Na stella

 

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