One of my favourite places to go walking is the Elan Valley. I particularly love going on a day when the water in the reservoirs are calm and reflect the hills like mirrors. I took this photo as my inspiration.The colours in the photo are a bit dull, so I dyed yarns to make it more colourful, going with a palette suitable for sunset on a warm autumn evening.I sketched out an abstracted image roughly based on the inspiration photo on graph paper for the pattern and worked out how many stitches and rows I would need to create a square big enough to cover a 30cm X 30cm square. On any ball of yarn there is a guide which tells you how many stitches and rows of yarn are required to make a 10cm X 10cm Swatch using a certain sized needle. You can then work out from this the number of stitches and rows you will need for you projects measurements.This knitting method is called “intarsia”. This means that you knit the different colours in blocks, working with several mini balls of wool at once. There are other ways of knitting with more than one Colour such as fair isle or stranded knitting but these are more suitable for work where there are only a few colours per row and the pattern is small, so you are only knitting a few stitches of each colour at a time. For big blocks of colour like this design, intarsia is the most suitable colourwork method.I was delighted with the finished design, mainly because of how the variegated yarns had worked in the sky. I had consciously made the lengths of colour quite long to achieve this look. You can see the difference in this piece compared to the indigo yarn in the bridge design which had much shorter lengths of colour. Blocking once again made a huge difference – it is difficult to achieve a regular tension with intarsia and my stitches looked very untidy, but blocking stretched them all into a much more even tension.The final image for the pattern. This is how I would have displayed my final work in the exhibition – I would have brought in a wicker chair and plants, a peg board on the wall with skeins of my hand dyed yarn hanging from them and a walking map. A walking stick would be propped against the chair. A side table to the left with my yarn swift clamped to it and yarn wound on it. Another side table to the right with a vase of flowers that can be used for dyeing – whatever I could forage that was in season and next to it a pile of my zines, including details of how to access the pattern for free via Ravelry, for people to read and take with them if they wanted.
clairemaloney 