A big project

I remember wondering, when I first started designing, "But what if I run out of ideas?"

Bwahahahaha. Oh, sweet, dear, naive me. Years later, it's clear that that is extremely unlikely to ever happen. Ideas come to me so much that I have to put other ideas on hold in order to work through them!

And a big one came to me this spring, which drove a lot of other projects to the back-burner: Patterns based on geometric whitework patterns from Western European manuscripts of the Middle Ages. It all started with this yarn:

That was my anniversary gift this year from my husband. It's wonderful and I fell in love with the colour combination immediately. I wanted to make something really special from it, using as much of it as humanly possible, and I did a lot of pattern hunting on Ravelry. I even cast on for a light vest...but it just didn't feel right.

Then I thought about pairing it with white for a stranded knitting motif, and it occurred to me to draw upon medieval whitework patterns. I picked one, adapted it to a knitting chart, and was off and running with a cowl and mittens. I tried to make a beret after that, but there wasn't enough yarn, so I went with an earband instead.

It worked so well that I decided to design other accessories based around the same theme. And thus, a collection was born!

I'm hoping to release the whole thing sometime in the fall, hopefully earlier rather than later - all the samples are made, most of the pattern write-ups are done, and I have a few more photo shoots to do. But it's getting close to completion, and I'm super-excited about it!

In fact, I've already released three of the patterns individually. Firstly, there's Beaulieu:

This is based on motifs from a French poetic work from 1353, and is named after the manuscript's scribe.

Then there's Corbichon:

It's inspired by one of the motifs from a pre-1416 French encyclopedia, and is named after the man who translated the text from Latin into French.

Finally (for now, anyway), there's Welles:

The motif used in these socks is seen very frequently in medieval manuscripts, particularly in an English manuscript from the first quarter of the 14th century called The Welles Apocalypse.

The remaining items in the collection will be: the cowl/mittens/earband set which started this whole thing; a scarf; a toque; and a felted bag.

Stay tuned!