Month: July 2014

It’s Summer! New Pattern just in time for Fall: Spring Willow. Winter?

OK, now that we’ve got all the seasons covered, it’s time to think (and knit) proactively. Rather than waiting for Fall to think about Fall knitting that you won’t finish until Winter and therefore won’t wear until next Fall, how about starting in on something new and fun in time for the cooler weather coming up? (Again, apologies to those in the southern hemisphere for my north-centric worldview here).

SpringWillow-3

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that I managed to find an even creepier statue to model my new pattern than the one that modeled Parallax v0.5. But hopefully you’ll also notice the stunning thing she’s wearing. Witness the first example of true double-knit lace — not merely two layers of lace stuck together, not merely using lace to embellish an otherwise normal piece of knitting, but reversible lace with subtle colorwork that literally could not have been done in any other way. If you’ve been following me, you may notice that this is the pattern I was working toward back when I made this post.

The pattern is called Spring Willow, and it’s a double-knit lace cowl in luscious Anzula Dreamy superwash merino/cashmere/silk yarn. It has a really nice drape for a double-knit piece, and the combination of lace and two layers makes it an ideal 3-season garment. As with all my patterns, every technique you’ll need is explained — with pictures, when possible. Double-knit lace is surprisingly easy to achieve, and you’ll soon find yourself cruising through this pattern in ample time to have it ready for the Fall and early Winter that it’s so well suited for. And even if it may not be best worn in the coldest midwinter, it can make a reappearance alongside its namesake as you begin to see the spring greens and new-growth browns that the colors were chosen to represent.

I hope you enjoy the pattern — for now it’s available on Ravelry but I’ll be posting it to Craftsy and Etsy as well in the near future. Here’s a closeup shot of the fabric:

SpringWillow-2

Further Updates

Good news for West Coast folks! I have been accepted to teach my full repertoire at Stitches West in 2015 — a couple of regular workshops and then the Sunday-Monday intensive ETC class where you’ll get to learn all kinds of advanced two-color double-knitting stuff. Rumor has it that registration is starting even earlier this year — next week, I believe? so I hope to see some of you there!

For my East Coast family, I am running a short series of workshops in Dorchester, Salem, Portland (ME) and at Harrisville Designs! More info on those once I have everything nailed down.

MusicBlox: Wintergatan

Homemade instruments like a custom musicbox and an analog keytar-ish thing join an unimaginable mixture of live acoustic and electronic instruments and samples in what is probably the most deliriously happy music I’ve listened to in a while without feeling like my brain is overdosing on cheese. OK, there’s some cheese, but it’s earnest cheese.

Wintergatan

Wintergatan (Swedish for the Milky Way) is a unique band made up of multi-instrumentalists who, in many cases, play multiple instruments at once on stage. Their stage setup above is sadly misleading — they set up tables in the shape of their band’s name and cover them completely with something like a hundred different instruments, then proceed to not play the vast majority of them. I would be far more impressed if they actually circulated through this field of instruments, picked them up and played them periodically. But even if it’s just a prop, it drives home the possibility that they probably could play any of these instruments if they wanted to — their skill is equal to the task, even if their mic and power setup isn’t (see? no cables to all those keyboards).

One of the things I love about these folks is that process seems as important as product to them. This is borne out in their music videos, at least a couple of which are twice as long as the song itself because they show all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating the video, or in some cases the instruments themselves. I’m particularly enamored of the custom music box they’ve created that actually gets used in their live shows. In the background you can see that they’ve actually created a custom melody tape to feed through the mechanism. This means one of two things: either there is a computer program that creates music-box tape according to a melody you create, or they wrote a computer program simply for this purpose. Either is pretty awesome, really.

So enough talk. Go listen. This video is full of incredible things, including all the stuff I mentioned plus homemade Lego stop-motion animation and a rhythm track made from slide-projector noises. Make sure to watch all the way to the end if you want to know how they put it all together.

Needless to say, I would be among the first in line if Wintergatan ever tours in the US, but for now they’re confined to their own continent so I’ll just wait. In the meantime, you can get their CD or vinyl album from their store if you’re in Europe, or go for digital at Bandcamp.