Yuki, part one-- cables

Designing comes from a weird place in me, a different place every time. Sometimes I'm faced with a yarn that needs something special, sometimes a motif strikes me as impossible to ignore. I don't really think of myself as a designer but more as a knitter who's struck with a need to get a pattern to paper when it strikes, for fear of the idea slipping away. Notebooks help, but goodness I can barely decipher the pattern I scribbled out for my felted mitered square bag two years later :)

As a knitter, I really appreciate anne's series on the progression of her patterns-- watching her patterns grow up from an idea, a stitch pattern into a fully formed thing gets me a little closer inside her head (in a non-weird knitter appreciation way!) and makes me admire the finished design a little more than had it jumped fully formed from the sea (or thigh, or forehead...) Cookie's installment for Socktoberfest is that same thing-- it sticks with you, makes you feel like you can do it too :)

So in (all that) vein, I've been meaning to share a project in progress and since I've been not knitting at all lately (making zero stitch markers for A Verb for Keeping Warm's booth at Stitches West, playing with my new-to-me Schacht Matchless (!!), hosting a houseguest...) it seems like a good time!


Yuki, part one

Now, I say part one because for this pattern I've been absolutely obsessed over how to manipulate one idea for a stitch pattern and my goal is threefold... cables, cables + colorwork, and colorwork. It may sound crazy but really, it's not-- the same groundwork is enough for all three, and it's just the realization and getting it onto paper that's the hard part :)

So let me back up... Yuki started with me wanting to design a continuous, circularly knit cable pattern that echoed a fishscale, a simple 1x1 cable that would translate well to small spaces and liberally use reverse stockinette so I could show the beautiful backside of handpainted yarns. It took lots of sketching and swatching to get a design that would work on the scale I was looking at and would be easy to work, but I did.



I chose Pigeonroof Studios yarn (merino/cashmere/nylon blend) for the 'part one-- cables' sock not only because I just love this color, but because Krista's colorways aren't too jarring or full of varying saturation or values. You can still see the cable pattern over the handpainted yarn, and it just makes me happy when they can both hang out and not overpower one another. It'd work well in a solid as well, but the almost-large reverse stst spaces on this sock scream to show the way handpainted yarns excel on the purl side.



Keeping true to the lovely look of rev stockinette, the sole of the foot is in the same...



I wanted this cable to work as a base for jumping off into colorwork with, and the dirty secret of it is that cables + colorwork is super awesome and if you can do both, you can do them together :) I'm getting ahead of myself though, that's part two.

But a sneak peek...



Til then!