I wish knitting magazines and publishers would start coming up with new stranded patterns. I've knit most of Nancy Bush's designs. I've knit all of the Nordic Fiber Arts mitten kits. I've It seems even Dale of Norway is producing fewer really lovely stranded designs these days. I often consider actually writing Nancy Bush, Alice Starmore, and Anna Zilboorg and asking them to please design more complicated stranded colorwork knitting projects. I'm withering away here...
Some of the responsibility is mine. In 2004 I spent way too much time doing knitting I wasn't interested in. I didn't challenge myself enough and I didn't do a single project with many colors (i.e., over a dozen). Whenever I knit with that many colors I find myself completely enchanted with the project.
I was looking through my projects for the previous years and have found they absolutely dwarf the projects for 2004. So this week we'll be taking a tour of past projects and why they turned me on. Perhaps that will rid me of my malaise.
Here we have the Dale baby sweater with the bunnies and ducks. Okay, so it needs steam blocking and the yarn I used was quite slippery and the ends kept working their way loose but I loved every second I worked on it.
Here's my very first Spontaneous Scarf and my favorite. It is hard to see in the photo but this is an example of the pure and vivid colors you can get when you do tone on tone colorwork. (Pattern is from an old issue of Spin-Off and each seed stitch row uses a different yarn.) I need to do another tone on tone project.
More tomorrow...