For, lo! I have seen the Promised Land (but I forgot to take my camera)

This weekend I think I may have attained knitting Nirvana. Whatever the heck happened I certainly had a lot of fun and learnt some very useful new skills, although I should probably be severely punished for blogging without due care and attention because I very stupidly forgot to take my camera to record the event for posterity.

What have I been doing that was so brilliant?

Well,Axelle and I spent the weekend at Rowan in Holmfirth participating in a workshop called 'Creative Design' taken by Louisa Harding.

(Louisa Harding!....the Rowan mill!....SQUEE!! My lunch was served by Kim Hargreaves' sister!!!11!)

Now I've got that out of my system I'll show you what I produced at least, even though I don't have any "in-progress" shots. Luckily Axe did remember her camera so if you check out her blog later in the week you should be able to see what she did, and some of the stuff done by the other participants. There were some amazing things, I'm telling you.

Here's what I did (Excuse the after dark photo - usual disclaimers).


Workshop results

The idea of the workshop was to come up with a design for an original garment based on inspiration from a picture, postcard or other source materials. One of the participants (a lovely lady named Doreen) even brought along one of her bathroom tiles with her and used that as a basis for her design. Louisa told us that the process we were following is very similar to the one she uses when she is designing for Rowan, which made me feel all grown up and designer-y before we even started :)

The first step was to put together a mood board. This involved lots of tearing pictures out of Vogue and Elle Decoration, sorting & sifting, cutting them out and sticking them onto a piece of paper to create an idea of the type of look and feel you want the garment to have. Here's a better picture of what I came up with for stage 1:


Mood board

As you can see, it's got all kinds of pictures on it and also some small twists of yarn in colours and textures that reflect the pictures on the board.

Stage 2 was to write a brief, which is basically a series of bullet points stating what you want the garment to be. Mine said things like "fluid", "smart casual" and "luxurious but practical". Frankly at this point I was a bit sceptical that any kind of garment could emerge from this process but I was having too much fun cutting and sticking and choosing yarn to care.

The next stage then was supposed to be to draw out your garment ideas and come up with a sketch of your design, but I was itching to knit so I set off making a swatch with a subset of the yarns on my mood board. This was when it all suddenly began to come together for me and ideas started zinging around the place. I spent the rest of the afternoon knitting like a crazy person and came up with this:


Swatch

The colour reproduction is a little bit bright but you get the idea. The slubby green colour is Jaeger luxury tweed, and the stripes are done in Kidsilk Haze, Kid Classic and Jaeger Matchmaker DK. The tree design was "borrowed" from one of the postcards on my board and backstitched on afterwards with 2 strands of Kidsilk Haze. Honesty means that I must also tell you that the embroidery was Louisa's idea, although the sewing is all my own work. I've also sewn some clear glass beads on at the end of the "tree branches", although I'm not sure that I'm going to keep them in the final design as they are a bit twinkly. The swatch is very airy with a good drape, and it's soft to the touch. Just what I was hoping for really, which was a bit of a surprise, but at least it was a pleasant one.

Day 2 of the workshop was spent finishing up swatches and turning them into written patterns for a final garment. A number of bad drawings and some crazy maths-skillz later and I have 90% of the pattern for a loose-ish fit jumper with a boat neck and bell sleeves primarily in the slubby green Jaegar tweed with these stripes around the sleeves and the bottom edge , and embroidered trees on the bottom edge stripes. All I have to do now is sketch out some of my curves on knitters graph paper and work out my decreases and increases. (And knit it of course, but let's not focus on that part for the moment).

I appear to have designed a jumper and written a pattern for it!

*faints*

So now you see why it was so much fun. Louisa was lovely, Holmfirth was lovely and I got to spend the whole weekend playing with yarn with a group of equally yarn-crazed, highly talented ladies. Absolute bliss.

And what about all that Christmas knitting I'm supposed to be doing? Well I finished the Harvest socks on the train on the way back but I haven't kitchenered up the toes yet so you'll have to wait for proof that I have actually have a finished object. Instead I'll leave you with a picture of my next pair in progress, again knitted out of Apple Laine Apple Butter, but this time using a vine lace pattern.


Vine lace sock

I'll post some more pictures later in the week, just as soon as I've worked out exactly who I'm going to give this pair to. Decisions, decisions :)