There's been a great reaction to our knitting pattern relaunches in
Vivacious and Gleem colours and it's made us think about some of the
ways in which our patterns get reinterpreted by talented crafters. We
invited Rhian of
The Crafty Geek to
talk us through her really fun interpretation of one of those
patterns. Rhian is a blogger, writer, editor and designer in the fibre
industry so she certainly knows her way around colourwork and knitting!
If you would like to win any of our relaunched patterns, you still have a chance if you head over to the
Ravelry group and check out how to enter. Hurry- the competition ends this afternoon!
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"One
of the best things about knitting is that you’re not constrained to
what’s popular or fashionable, or what designs are in the shops. As
knitters we’re free to make our own clothes – to choose from patterns
designed all over the globe, to carefully pick out the colours and yarns
we like the best, and, if we wish, to tweak those patterns to suit
ourselves, from adding length, ease or waist shaping to including or
adapting colourwork or textured patterns.
Challow in the original Scrumptious 4ply
When I first saw Jeni’s gorgeous
Challow
design, I fell in love with the drape and the shaping of the garment,
as well as the pretty colourwork around the yoke. But although I knew I
would love and wear the original design, I couldn’t resist making it
even more... me.
Vivacious Challow from this week's relaunch
I’m
a self-confessed sci-fi geek, and one of my favourite programmes is
Doctor Who, both the old show and the new. I’d seen the huge range of
Who-inspired knits out there, and even knit a couple. So I couldn’t
resist the little voice inside me saying “you know... you could swap
that butterfly for a Dalek.”
And so I set to work.
I wasn’t convinced I could chart a Dalek by myself, so I turned to a design I’d made before: the
Exfoliate
pattern by Penwiper. This uses bobbles and purl stitches to create a
textured Dalek, but it’s clear from the chart that it would work just as
well as a colourwork design.
The easiest way to make the
switch would be to do a straight swap in terms of the size of the
motif. The original butterfly is 13 stitches across, and 13 high – but
the actual chart, including borders,is 27 stitches high, so I knew I had
this to play with without having to make any radical changes to the
design! I played around with the chart of the Dalek and was able to crop
it to 13 stitches wide by simply straightening the back. I tweaked the
rest of the design a little, removing two of the horizontal lines to
bring the design down to 22 rows high. This was too big to just replace
the butterfly, but not tall enough to replace the whole of the chart
with the borders. I decided that the solid lines at the base of the
Daleks would create a strong line across the sweater to replace
the bottom border, and I tweaked the top border slightly to run above my
Daleks.
Rhian's amazing rework in Scrumptious 4ply
I
was pleased to find I still had a gap between the top of the Dalek and
the top border – in the pattern, this is where the short rows are placed
to raise the back of the sweater. If my pattern had covered those
rounds, I’d have either had to distort the colourwork or move the
shaping, possibly affecting the fit of the top, so I’m glad that wasn’t
the case! And now when I wear it, it’s an easy way to tell which is the
front and which is the back – the back has a larger gap between the top
of the Daleks and the border.
Exterminate!
Having
finalised my basic chart and ensured it would fit, I was left with one
more challenge before casting on. The original butterfly design is
symmetrical, but the Dalek is facing side-on. There are a number of ways
to deal with this – I could have had all the Daleks facing the same way
around the whole top, or I could possibly have mirrored them down the
middle of the sweater. For the size I was working, the chart was
repeated 20 times around – an even number. Because of this I decided to
work the Daleks in pairs, groups of two facing each other. If I’d been
working a size with an odd number of chart repeats, I would have had to
choose a different arrangement, or worked fewer repeats with a gap in
between each one.
Rhian's sweater in all it's glory
With
all that decided, all I had left to do was knit the top! It was an easy
knit; the body and sleeves were very straightforward in-the-round
knitting, with the colourwork at the end to keep things interesting. I
was very nervous about how it would actually look when I was done – I
have to shamefacedly admit I never swatched the design, just waited to
see how it looked knitted all around the yoke. Bad knitter! But it
worked better than I could have imagined, and always draws attention and
compliments when worn. I love having a top that’s so very, very “me”
(with thanks to Jeni and Penwiper), and currently have plans to adapt
several more knitting patterns in a geeky way."
