Developing ideas for the French Treats holiday, Part 4

Back in May I wrote 3 posts about developing design ideas for the French Treats Holiday in June based on photographs I took on the holiday last year. The posts showed some of the drawings I did but that was all. I did develop these drawings into knitted pieces before the holiday but did not have time to post more details until now.

These are some developments I made based on the poppies pictures. I had several poppies pictures but I particularly like the one that focused on the stalks and seed heads.

The seed head drawing looked OK so I traced the drawing onto tracing paper.

I traced both images but I didn't draw the seed heads in detail as I wasn't sure at this point how I was going to interpret them in knitting. The stalks where easier to interpret as I could see them knitted as a twisted knit stitch on a purl background.

I was looking through my Japanese stitch pattern books and came across a chart to knit this pattern below (with some adjustments as i was knitted the sample).

I particularly liked the way the popcorn/bobbles where made and thought this would be a good way to knit the seed heads in my picture.

The next step was to transfer the traced image onto stitch related graph paper. I prefer to use stitch related graph paper even if it is not the exact rows and stitches combination rather than squared paper as stitches are a rectangular shape not square.

This was the chart I made from the tracing. I have drawn in the twisted knit stitch showing how it travels across the purl background but I have not added any symbols for the purl stitches as this would make the chart very busy. I did indicate on the chart whether to increase 3 stitches or 5 stitches for the seed heads but it isn't very clear on the chart. At this point the chart is for my own use rather than to be published so it doesn't matter too much how the chart is drawn as long as I understand it. If I every publish the chart I will have to redraw it using suitable symbols.

And here is the finished knitted piece. It has been knitted in the 'Knitting by Numbers' yarn from John Arbon and I worked a cable at each edge as I was thinking of joining different pieces together by lacing through the cables.

I haven't done much development with the original image but I was quite pleased with the finished piece of knitting.

I hope to post about one of the other pieces of work in the next few days.