juxtaposing

Good morning! I’m going to introduce you to my Colour Compass pullover pattern tomorrow, which means that today’s pattern is the collection’s final smaller project – a modular shawl or kerchief with many colour options, and many different ways to wear it: Juxtaposing.

This pattern is by a talented guest designer who we were keen to involve in the Colour Compass project, Sarah Mackay. Sarah has great design ideas, and is particularly brilliant at combining colour and form in smaller projects, such as the two patterns she’s contributed to earlier KDD books, Milarrochy Heids and Warm Hands.

In Every Flavour, Sarah combined welts and short rows in undulating waves of colour . . .

. . .while in the Dissonance mitts, Sarah created a pair of matching opposites through canny colour blocking

Building an outfit around Sarah’s mitts allowed my co-editor, Jeanette, and myself to enjoy one of this collection’s most pleasing styling moments, with Mimi in her colour blocked mitts and house jumper against a bright yellow wall. Wow!

I had seen some of Sarah’s recent creative experiments with garter stitch kerchiefs, and they really impressed me. Like many of you, I am familiar with knitting two small triangles to make a garter stitch mitred square, but the method Sarah was using in the wee kerchiefs she had been working on seemed particularly lovely, particularly clean and neat.

With only a few yards used per triangle, a modular project like this would be a brilliant inclusion in our Colour Compass project, allowing the knitter to really make the most of the yarn in her advent box while enjoying lots of colour play. Small scraps of yarn, left over from knitting the pullover or cardigan might be used. And just like quilts composed of triangular blocks, there were so many possibilities for using different shades and layouts to create a range of graphic looks. Might Sarah be interested in transforming her experiments with triangles into a brand new design for Colour Compass? She said yes!

The brief was simple: with no more than 100m of each shade, could Sarah create a pattern in three sizes?

A mini kerchief, that could be worn around the head?

or neck?

And how about a slightly larger kerchief?

just the right size for lifting a plain outfit with some colour, or tucking into the open collars of a coat?

And finally, working within our yardage constraints, could Sarah make a small triangular shawl using the same modular construction?

yes she could!

In a manner that’s typical of Sarah, the Juxtaposing pattern includes many nifty knitterly details, such as the mid-row intarsia twist, which creates super-clean shade transitions, and means that your kerchief or shawl will always look great on its “wrong” side too. Maylin and Claire worked with Sarah during the pattern development / test knitting phase of this design, and like much of the knitting work we conducted for this project, the intention here was to explore some of the different things that knitters might choose to do with a pattern. Claire felt that a small modular project like this was a great opportunity to see how shades that were very close together in the Milarrochy Tweed palette might work together when knitted up.

Claire created a mini-kerchief composed blocks of autumnal colour that looks wonderful on Fenella.

Maylin, who enjoys quilting as well as knitting, spotted in this pattern an opportunity to play with triangular layout as well as colour.

Working with Foxglove, Ardnamurchan, Horseback Brown and Stockiemuir for the triangles and Gloamin‘ for the edging, Maylin’s small shawl is both bold in hue and graphic in appearance.

Just a small change in the positioning and pairing of the coloured triangles creates a dramatically different effect. When knitting this pattern, feel free to experiment, like Maylin!

With 3 sizes and 24 colours in your yarn box, there are so many directions in which you might take Juxtaposing . . .

Which one will you choose?

Thanks, Sarah, for your fabulous pattern and tireless sample knitting; Maylin and Claire for testing and developing, Tom for photography, Frauke for editing, Fenella, Iona, Kendall and Kate C for modelling. I managed proceedings, and particularly enjoyed choosing four grey dresses from the KDD wardrobe to suit each of our models, and set off Sarah’s gorgeous blocks of colour: each a slightly different grey, and different style.

If you’d like to join us as we embark on a new year of colourful knitting, the Colour Compass yarn box and ebook is now available!