This past week was the first week of Stained Fingers Dye Camp at Indigodragonfly’s studio. I wasn’t attending but three of my friends did and had a blast! I went along to Haliburton and took the week to work on some new designs and make progress on others. Plus I had the opportunity to show off my designer in residence project to Kim and Ron in person!

I’ve made a bit of progress on this project in the past month, completing 8 repeats so far of the 12 row chart for the body. So the countdown is on – although there are 39 more repeats to go before I get to finish the stole with the other edging. Knitting on this project has slowed down a bit with other design deadlines taking precedence.

I want to talk a bit about my inspiration for the stitch pattern used for the body of this piece. Although I’ve blogged about the edging first, when I was working on the concept for this design, it was the body stitch pattern that I needed to establish first. Only then would I be able to come up with an appropriate edging design.

When I originally doodled some ideas for for this design, the only idea I had was that I wanted something with strong vertical lines. You may not see them clearly yet in the photos of the stitch pattern but, once it’s blocked, the vertical elements will be clear.

With that in mind, I started paging through stitch dictionaries and my files of stitch pattern images saved on my computer. Early on I came across the image below on a Pinterest board and knew it was perfect but had difficulty finding a chart or written instructions.

I kept looking and finally found instructions I thought might be what I was looking for – except they were in Russian! The chart that accompanied the written instructions was confusing but I started tackling it and after a few swatch attempts was getting something that occassionally showed signs of being the stitch pattern I hoped for. Over the month of February, I kept plugging away, changing a stitch here, a yarn over there but wasn’t making the progress I hoped for. I was ready to throw in the towel and use a different stitch pattern – and then fate intervened. A friend gave me a leaflet to browse, Berroco #344, Berroco Folio™, and there down the front panel of Iwi was my stitch patttern (and even stranger in almost the same colour as my yarn)!

I quickly flipped to the charts and within moments understood my mistakes. Once I got home, it was the work of moments to fix my charts and start a new swatch. Success! I was all ready to go with the body of the design and at that point, I could move on to create the edging. The zig zag pattern in the edging was selected to mirror the body stitch pattern and tie the two elements together.