It is no secret that I love variegated yarn, I mean REALLY LOVE variegated yarn. It seems like most of my stash is comprised of wild and crazy and fingering weight yarns, usually one or two skeins and all of them are just a bit too crazy for most patterns. It is also no secret that I love patterning, and mixing pattering with wild yarn, but lately I have been spending a lot of time investigating what kind of patterning works best with these yarns. How does it react to certain manipulations? what can we as knitters look for in a stitch pattern to help these yarns out, instead of warring with them?
One answer I have found is using slipped stitches with long floats, not only are they beautiful, but they shift the colors of the yarn around enough that it helps to prevent pooling and flashing. They also create movement within the the work that compliments the movement of the color in the yarn. After completing the Coral Palace Shawl and then the Palomino Sunset Shawl I was looking for another stitch pattern that made use of these long floats and larger lace holes. I couldn't find one that I liked or that seemed like it would really work for the shawl I was trying to create. But I did find a smocked pattern with long floats that captured my interest, and I wondered if I could alter it to include some lace as well.
After some tinkering with large triple wrapped yarnovers, extra decreases, slipped stitches and a touch of garter stitch this almost quilted, very geometric, sort of hexagonal pattern was born. With the warm orange yarn I was using it reminded me strongly of little starbursts, and the flickering light from the night sky.
I am a present time kind of gal, I live in the moment, I am direct, honest and impulsive. I try hard to be patient and sometimes succeed, but the kind of person who thinks in years? or hundreds of years? I am not that person. So for me, stars exist on a totally different time frame then I am really capable of understanding. The fact that the light from a star can take between 4 years to upwards of 7 000 years to reach earth is fascinating. The starlight from the closest star that left home August 22nd 2012 has been traveling unimpeded across the galaxy for approximately 4 years and will shine on us tonight. The starlight from further stars that shines today will never reach us in our lifetimes. And what we do see from these further stars left sometime during the Neolithic Revolution when Humans were just discovering one of the basic ingredients of civilization, namely Agriculture. When something transcends our human timeline in such a huge way how do we measure it? or understand it? It seems to me that perhaps this starlight is really just a ghost of what it was when it left the star, a Celestial Phantom of sorts.
So if you want to knit your way across the universe with me grab some crazy yarn and get ready; garter stitch tab, top down shawl, lots of extra yarnovers and a little smocking but still easy. Rave reviews from testers who said it was just plain fun to knit, interesting but simple enough to be fast and addictive.
You can find this pattern on my Website here
And you can Fav it (which I sincerely appreciate)
on Ravelry here
