Developing a Design Idea

A couple of months ago I had a crop jumper design published in Knitting magazine. The cable pattern on the garment was developed from photographs and sketches of ideas taken on one of the French Treats Knitting Holidays I taught on several years ago. Here is a picture of the finished garment.

Three years ago when I was teaching in France with Sasha Kegan I was teaching a workshop on cables and at the time I was asked to develop some cable patterns based on an Abbey we had visited the previous year. This was quite challenging as I didn't remember seeing anything  that would obviously work into a cable pattern.

The only image I could think of that might lend itself to being worked into some kind of cable was the ceiling in the cloisters at the Abbey. so I started doing some sketches and tracings from the pictures of the ceiling.

Playing around with these images, particularly the drawing on the right hand page of the image above did remind me a bit of some cable stitch patterns I had seen in one of my Japanese stitch library books. I went through the stitch library book and chose 2 stitch patterns to try knitting. I was also thinking about these stitch patterns being used in a cushion cover so knitted both at the same time with moss stitch between each pattern.

Having knitted this sample I liked the left hand pattern where the cable disappears into the 'arch' above and on the right hand pattern I liked the lace used to edge the cable. Both patterns came with charts so it was much easier to play around with the patterns in chart form. I worked up another chart and when knitted it looked like this.

I thought it worked OK as one of the samples for the knitting holiday that year but when I got home again I decided to work on the pattern a bit more to refine it a bit more and also to make it into more of a motif pattern than an all over pattern and here is the finished result...

The finished garment is knitted in an Aran weight cotton yarn. It is a long sleeve crop jumper but it would be quite easy to re-work as a normal length jumper.

French Treats Knitting Holiday Year 2

I'm back in France for a second year teaching on the French Treats Knitting holiday. We all arrived at various times yesterday. It is a smaller group this year but as usuual a very nice group of ladies.

It was a bit grey this morning first thing but the weather has been very dry out here in France since February. It brightened up a bit later.

After breakfast everyone got settled in in the workroom to start the week. After introductions Sasha and I covered knitting Intarsia with the weaving in techniques i.e. carrying the background colour across the back of the motif. We also spent a bit of the morning rewinding the skeins of John Arbon Knitting by Numbers yarn that was sent out to use during the week.

It is a very nice yarn to knit with but comes in 100gm skeins so they needed to be re-wound into a number of small balls for everyone to have as wide a choice of colours as possible.

After lunch and a few spots of rain the knitters went for a walk to look for wild flowers, grasses etc to work from for the design workshop this afternoon.

As you can see from this last photo the fields around 'Le Vieux' are very dry but everyone found something to work with and take back for the afternoon workshop. I've left them busy drawing motifs with Sasha. I'm off to have a bit of a break and do some knitting by the pool while they all work!!



Developing ideas for the French Treats holiday, Part 3

I am teaching at Le Vieux Monastere again this year in June and September. On the June holiday I will be teaching alongside Sasha Kegan and this year we are working on 'Designing from Nature'. I am specifically covering Cables and Embellishments as well as helping in the general design workshop. The design work I have shown has been developed with this year's holiday in mind.

In this last group of pictures from my sketchbook I was working from photos of the pillars and ceiling in the cloisters at the Abbey with the idea of developing these into cable type patterns.

One of the ladies on the holiday kindly sent me this and another photo as I didn't take any photos of the pillars myself.

PhotoShop can be a very useful tools when developing design work. I used a filter on the photo shown on the previous page to just show the edges giving an image that looks very like a pencil drawing. I'm not that good at drawing so I then traced over this printed image to produce the image below it on the other page. Doing this tracing gave me a better understanding of how the arches fit together.

I then isolated and traced some lines which I used to produce the drawings on these 2 pages.

I did some more work with tracing the arches along similar lines to the picture opposite (a line edge print of another photo in the cloisters) I am now playing around with how to translate these arches into knitted cables - more samples to come.

I did also take photos of an old tree at the Abbey and this is a close up image of the tree bark which I thought might work well as a knit and purl pattern.

so there is plenty of work for me to be getting on with!!

Developing ideas for the French Treats holiday, Part 2

This second group of design work is based on some of the flowers at the 'Abbey' we visited on the Sunday. I took some close up shots of flowers in a pot. I'm not a gardener so I don't know what they are called but I liked the colours. Each flower is fairly simple to draw as the petals are quite open and each flower has 5 petals.

On this page from my sketchbook I am showing a cropped picture of the flowers, a watercolour drawing and a couple of coloured pencil drawings of groups of flowers. I will trace some of these images onto stitch related graph paper so I can knit or Swiss darn the flowers. When I have made some samples I will upload the images.

As well as drawing from the photo of the flowers I also used it as a colour source for yarn wrappings as shown in the picture below.

The yarn wrapping at the top left has been worked using a mix of yarns from my stash. The yarn wrapping at top right has been worked using the Knitting By Numbers yarn. In the second wrapping I added more green to the wrapping as there is quite a lot of green in the picture. The wrapping at the bottom is still using the same KBN yarn colours but rather than working the stripes based on the colour proportions in the picture I have wrapped stripes based on a random stripes generator.

The yarn wrappings on this 3rd page are also based on the random stripes generator but using the same range of yarn colours from KBN. The random stripes generator I used is from the website http://www.biscuitsandjam.com/index.php or you can try googling random stripes generator. You can select as many colours as you want from their grid of colours and also select the widths of various stripes e.g. using the Fibonacci sequence and then press the go button. If you don't like the combination offered you can press the refresh button to get a new selection. It is very addictive and you can spend hours playing with the colour sequences!!

As I said I'll post some samples once they have been knitted.

Developing ideas for the French Treats holiday, Part 1

Last June I was invited to teach on the French Treats Knitting Holiday at Le Vieux Monastere. While there I took quite a few photographs, but I have only just recently got around to doing some drawing from these photos. I've looked at several different aspects so I will post each group of pictures together in several posts.

The property is in the middle of fields so when we were waiting to get into the buses for an excursion on one of the days I took some photos of the poppies and wild flowers at the edge of the field. Below is a closeup print of one of the photos with a colour pencil drawing opposite it.

 I made several drawings using similar pictures.

On this next page I used watercolours rather than pencils and I also made a yarn wrapping trying to match the colours in the photo. The yarns used for the yarn wrapping are 'Knitting By Numbers' 100% merino wool DK from Fibre Harvest. It is a very nice yarn to work with and each colour comes in a range of tones from light to dark. Although I haven't included the wild flowers on the right of the photo in my watercolour drawing I have included their colour in the yarn wrapping.

While making these drawings I realised that I was particularly interested in the plant stems and seed heads of the poppies and how they cross over each other.

On this last page I have concentrated on drawing the poppy seed heads and stems rather than the flowers. I can see these drawings being worked in a raised twisted knit stitch on a purl background and the seed heads as a cluster stitch.

When I have knitted up some samples I will post the images of the knitted samples.