Design: The Sky's the Limit

Last week I talked about inspiration, knowledge, skill, and confidence as requirements for a good knit design, and I described a landscape that has inspired me. Today I'll talk about turning an inspiration into a design, using my own knowledge of knitting.

If I want to turn the scene out my old front window into a knit design, there are at least two inter-related decisions I need to make: first, what kind of garment to make, and, second, how to render this design through knitting.

A big thanks! to all of you who took the poll to help me decide how to proceed with this design. Here are the results:

1) Reproduce the landscape in color patterns (2 votes)

2) Use textured stitching for 3D representation (no votes)

3) Use a combination of color and texture (14 votes)

4) Break up the landscape into more abstract elements (2 votes)

Let me explain these alternatives in a little more detail.

If I think in terms of the picture I have in mind, it translates pretty well into a sweater. Using a flat color pattern, I could produce an impressionist scene on a sweater or shawl, rather like a tapestry, a rug, or a Kaffe Fassett sweater. On the back of the sweater, you would see a table, a potted jade plant, part of a pink azalea, and cedar branches starting from the center back and extending around to the front of a cardigan. There could be some pink azalea blossoms drifting over to one side of the front, too. The pattern could be done on a white or sky-blue background, but most of the sweater would be done in color patterning, probably some intarsia and some two- or three-color work.

This kind of design would require exact measurements of size to get the color charting right, or I could end up with gaps or overlapping areas - it would probably be a good project for design software, but I don't have any of that. It might also be good for a knitting machine that's attached to design software. It could be done by hand, of course, with a lot of color changes. And I also have to figure out what on earth to do with the sleeves!

A way around the sleeve dilemma is to make a shawl - the main pattern could be in the large part of a triangular shawl, with the cedar branches tapering off on either side as the shawl does. And if I didn't feel like wearing it, a shawl looks awfully nice draped over a chair . . .

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