kimley knits

I was happily knitting along on a Boneyard Shawl (by Stephen West) for myself with the super lovely Wolle’s Color Changing Cotton when I made the mistake of showing it to my mom two days before Mother’s Day. Well…  you can guess what happened. She loved it. And then I also made the mistake of showing her my other skeins of Wolle’s in my stash and she made a not so subtle hint about what she’d like for Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, I’m one of the slowest knitters on the planet so she got to preview a tiny fraction of her Boneyard Shawl on Mother’s Day proper and then we had some champagne and I packed it up and only just gave the completed project to her last week. At least it was worth the wait if I do say so myself. It was not easy to part with.

[button link=”http://www.ravelry.com/projects/Kimley/boneyard-shawl-2″ color=”#c2ebb1″ text=”dark” window=”yes”]My Project Details on Ravelry[/button]

So now I’m back to working on mine and eagerly anticipating having my own ombré-colored boneyard shawl.

My mom’s is in the amazing Dante colorway and mine is in the Sand colorway which goes from an eggshell blue to a darker grey-blue to an olive-khaki color. I can’t tell you how much I love the way this yarn knits up. Practically every shawl design I see now I think how would it look in some Wolle’s color changing yarn???

As a graphic designer, one of my favorite parts of the job is playing around with color and seeing how different colors interact with one another. It can be quite shocking at times just how different colors will look against a variety of other colors. A very intense color theory class that I took in college taught me all the ins and outs of this while doing all those crazy Joseph Albers exercises. Fun!

So now it’s great to see this working up in my knitting. No doubt, Joseph’s wife Anni Albers, a textile artist enjoyed this kind of fiber excitement too! I don’t normally do a lot of color work so I don’t really get to play with color combos that much when it comes to my knitting but I’m having a ton of fun with my Spectra Scarf watching how the Noro is working up next to this dark reddish brown color (the Kale colorway in Madelinetosh Merino Light) versus how it looked in the ripple scarf I crocheted a while back. The photo above shows the two photographed together and there is a very noticeable difference in how the Noro colors look. They seem so much more saturated surrounded by the darker color than on their own. Love it!

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at some intarsia for a while now but having muddled at my short-lived attempt at stranded color work (too fiddly) I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it. But I’ve had several Stephen West designs in my Ravelry queue for a while now and I just conveniently happened to have 226 yards of leftover Noro Sock yarn in my stash which is only 4 yards short of the 230 yards required for the Spectra Scarf pattern so I think it was meant to be.

I took my Noro to my LYS and found a good matching skein of the Madeline Tosh Merino Light (currently my favorite yarn!) and can happily say that so far my first attempt at intarsia is quite enjoyable. Although this is probably about as easy as intarsia can get since you only have to wrap your two colors of yarn on one end due to short rows on the other. Even though this is a simple-looking pattern, it’s very cleverly written. No doubt I’ll be knitting up a few other Stephen West designs in the not-too-distant future.