Modern Daily Knitting Field Guide No. 16: Painterly.

The sixteenth installment of the Modern Daily Knitting Field Guide series is here! Let’s take a peek inside.

MDK’s series of Field Guides are pocket-sized booklets focused on a particular theme, knitting technique, or designer. The legendary designer Kaffe Fassett is back for his second Field Guide – let’s take a look inside Painterly.

Painterly is a colorful little book about intarsia, a colorwork technique where a separate length of yarn is used for each area of color. In stranded colorwork, the motifs go all the way around the knitted fabric, but intarsia frees up the colors and motifs for different effects – a rather underrepresented technique, and Fassett is here to demystify it.

Many of us are most familiar with intarsia from “picture” sweaters of the 1970’s and ’80’s, and associate the technique with representational forms – a sailboat, a tree, etc. Kaffe Fassett favors geometric designs, and so this booklet is full of triangles and squares, giving these unique accessories a patchwork appearance.

We also got a few more copies of Fassett’s first MDK Field Guide, Master Class – one or both would make an excellent gift for a colorwork enthusiast!

MDK Field Guides are $14.95 eachorder online for local pickup or shipping, and let us know if we can recommend a yarn for any of these patterns – happy to make suggestions and send photos of what we have available!

Show and tell: colorwork.

We love to see finished projects that started life as yarn on our shelves, and when I’m able, I love to photograph them and share them here on the blog. I noticed a theme running through my current stash of show-and-tell photos: colorwork. I’m defining that term broadly to include stripes, colorblocks, stranded knitting and intarsia – all the myriad methods for changing colors as you knit.

We’ll begin with Margie, who brought two special pieces in for us to see, both designed by Kieran Foley. Above is “Lotus Crescent,” a unique shawl bursting with techniques from lace to stranded knitting to intarsia – sometimes all three in the space of one row! Margie used Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift for this one, eager to play with the large color palette.

Kieran Foley’s patterns are not for the faint of heart, but Margie persevered. Below is her “Zanzibar” scarf, knit with Schoppel-Wolle Crazy Zauberball and a variety of fingering weight scraps.

Loretta knit Melanie Berg’s “Drachenfels” shawl with three shades of Fibre Company Cumbria Fingering, a yarn she’s since used for mittens and has come to love.

This adorable “Pandamonium” hat was Wanda’s first attempt at stranded knitting, and she did a great job! The yarn is Rowan Pure Wool Superwash DK, and she came back for more to make another colorwork hat, encouraged by the success of this one.

Margaretta knit this “3 Color Cashmere Cowl” with Fibre Company Canopy Fingering in a most appealing trio of colors: two greens and a dark charcoal. It was a beautiful combination when I first saw it as three skeins of yarn, only to grow more beautiful as Margaretta stitched them into a cozy cowl.

Ruth knit the “Dreambird” shawl below using Schoppel-Wolle Starke 6 and Swans Island Natural Colors Merino Fingering, with help from a class on the subject here at the shop. The pairing of a self-striping yarn with a semi-solid hand-dyed yarn is a striking one for this pattern, perfect for showing off the short-row shaping.

Thanks to the knitters, crocheters, and weavers who bring in their work to show us what they’ve made! You inspire and amaze us, and we can’t wait to see what you get into next. Hope to see you at the shop soon, but do note our holiday hours, which are always posted on the main page of our website:

Saturday, Dec. 24: 10:00 am – 2:00 pm

Sunday, Dec. 25: closed

Saturday, Dec. 31st: 10:00 am – 2:00 pm

Sunday, Jan. 1st, 2017: closed