ConnieLene – KnitDesigner

There is a project that makes my mind boggle at the sheer time, dedication and mastery of the craft that will be required to create it?

You already know that generally I do not knit fair isle. I have created a sweet little pinafore with a row of hearts – which were created with yarns stranded across the back – a very simple Fair Isle. My boats on little boys sweaters were done with intarsia. When I had a knitting machine eons ago – I did manage to create pieces with Fair isle designs.

You also know that I attended a workshop in Amsterdam with Danish knit designer and artist Christel Seyfarth

Christel lives and works on the Danish island of Fano. The changing tides, the special light and the sky are all important source of inspiration for her special and unique knit designs. She is fascinated by traditional clothes and takes the old patterns and designs and translates them into modern creations and her creations are in Fair Isle. She showed us at that workshop in Amsterdam that although it looks complex it is in fact simple fair isle. Her work is amazing in its construction, colour use and the finishing is just superb.

I was gobsmacked on that day and I still think of it with a great deal of pleasure – for all sorts of reasons. We both love the sea and light, our environments, colours, and yarns. There is pleasure in all of those things – but I simply cannot imagine myself with the skills and patience and the dedication to create one of her truely amazing pieces and I am terrified of steeks. Piffle you say! No it is not piffle.

It is not the Fair Isle, that seems to be as easy as Christel has said. It is not the colour – I am in love with colour. The pieces are made in rectangles and triangles – easy. It is the techniques including the steeks, and the dramatic finishing of each piece.

Do I have the patience, the skills, the confidence? I don’t actually know.

So my challenge is to knit a piece designed by Christel Seyfarth. On my “to do” list for me, that is the finished piece which will be created by me will also be for me. It will have to wait until we have settled back in New Zealand. So the winter of 2012 on New Zealand – that will be July to September 2012 – my big project will be a Christel Seyfarth design. It will include steeks – which as I have said already, quite frankly terrify me.

I am no longer going to be a scaredy cat regarding steeks. So there.

Day Four: 31st March. Where is it now?

I do know exactly what happened to that stained glass sweater – but I have not thought about it in a very long time.

This sweater was initially created for a fashion parade in Orewa, north of Auckland, New Zealand. It must have been around 1989. It was a simple intarsia sweater, created with various wonderful browns/oranges/fawns variegated yarns separated by black mohair lines – hence “stained glass”

I believe that our daughter was to wear said sweater in the parade, and right now I cannot remember if she actually did so. But I guess that is okay after all these years.

The sweater was in the parade in Orewa and then went with other local fashion designs and two other knits of mine to Hawaii for a parade and event there.

Our daughter at the time had very serious glandular fever and had been away from school for 6 months – and her recovery was very slow. She had been very down, a young teenager with lots to look forward to, being very ill for some considerable time. We encouraged her to apply for a Rotary Scholarship which if successful would provide her impetus with something so big to look forward to. She had to decide if she could go to Hawaii for the fashion parade as a model or to “somewhere” on the Rotary Scholarship if she was successful.

She opted for the Rotary Scholarship and was successful. – It is another story but even up to a few weeks from departure date for Europe on that scholarship we were all uncertain if she the strength to go – but she did and she had a wonderful year in Denmark.

Back to the sweater – which went to Hawaii without her.

After the sweater was paraded in all its glory along with two other pieces of mine in Hawaii it returned to New Zealand and it became our daughters sweater and she wore it for many years. She went on to university in Auckland, where she lived in a flat with others and one of the others had a dog. Nothing unusual in that of course – except that the sweater faded from view. One day I asked about the sweater which had travelled the world and been part of her life for a long time and it transpired that the “dog” had chewed a great deal of it. That is it was unwearable and destroyed.

She sheepishly brought the sweater home and we looked it and we put it to one side. I did plan to undo, unravel, reknit etc the sweater – but I kept looking, I washed it by hand very gently and looked at it some more.

Eventually I decided that it was just too hard to fix. Mohair is very difficult to undo and the damage was extensive.

So it went to the sweater pile in the ether somewhere.

30th March. Tidy mind, tidy stitches.

Yarns waiting

Just how do I keep my yarn and other crafty things organised? It seems like this should be a very easy question to answer. BUT I am living in the Netherlands, in a house, so called, of three floors.

Floor 1 – Kitchen, dining space, bathroom & laundry, entrance door and steps up
Floor 2 – Lounge and steps up
Floor 3 – attic bedroom

So what do I do with my stash and other crafty components in this house, so called?

Well I do have 2 plastic filing cabinets with yarn in the lounge, and in the bedroom I have a window seat under the eaves with plastic containers of yarns, knitting needles, fabrics, crepe paper, crochet hooks, plastic tubes, buttons, beads and WIP’s and UFO’s and so on and on. Generally I sort my yarns by type so that all the dk yarns are together, as are the mohairs, fun faux furs, 12 ply yarns, cottons and so on.

Freeform Intarsia snippet

The BIG trouble is if I am creating:

then that Best Beloved knows that chaos (from his point of view will ensue).

Especially if the creation will be using the freeform intarsia technique.

Because then it is only the colour that matters – more or less.

I remove from all the cubby holes, bags, boxes and containers all the colours that I could require and I spread them on the coffee table, across the 2 couches and on the chair in front of my knitting chair and even on our bed, the only real bed in this house, so called. The yarn weight or type has become irrelevant – it is now all about the colour. And I play with all those colours, move them about, change the order, take them outside and see how they look in sunlight and so on.

Then I have to manage the yarns I am not going to use and I just put them into the nearest container or three, or move them all to one couch or anything to get them out of the way so that Best Beloved will survive the event and so that I can now knit.

Which means all of my yarn stash order is now lost.

But creativity rules even in this house, so called.

Does that mean that being a free form intarsia knitter/designer means an untidy mind? Hope not.

I will not contemplate it meaning Untidy stitches though. That would never do.