I love my little knitting blog! I design / create unique, original high quality accessories. I sell what I make on Etsy and my own web site - thefemininetouchdesigns.co.uk. Some of my creations I have written up in to knitting patterns & kits which are now published on-line. Here on my blog I share what I have learnt, business wise & crafting wise and happy to promote other crafty sellers. You will find some of my personal experiences here too.
I have transformed what was a plain, but still pretty knitted peg bag in to something quite magically. I'm still quite taken aback by how the simple mosaic knitting / slip stitch knitting can make so much of a difference.
These peg bags were knit using one of my own patterns , the cotton clothes hanger peg bag, but instead of just knitting the K3, P1 stitch I had used in the pattern I chose one of the mosaic patterns out of Barbara Walkers book "Mosaic Knitting" which I reviewed a few months back. What a transformation, something that you all need to try.
My latest craze is Mosaic knitting, I'm sure you will have realised that from my numerous postings about the subject , whether its me showing off my latest cushions, letting you know of my freebie dish cloth pattern or writing about the "Mosaic Knitting" book I had recently ordered. All in All the last few weeks have been a steep but very pleasant learning curve for me.
It was very nice to see the culmination of my efforts, the final flourish of activity before I can say that my new range of summer cotton cushions is finally launched!
I have launched the range with a bang (the loudest I can do without spending loads of money on adverts). After developing The Craft Britannia Wedding Promotional Video I decided that I would make a video for the launch of the cushions. It should have been a fairly simple little thing, I was only going to show off 3 cushions! (and the knitting patterns for them).
Well just take a look at the video and you'll see how mad I have gone, with a little photo editing I have changed green grass to pink, changed a pink flower on a cushion to blue and now have a number of different coloured cushions (I didn't knit all those, honest). There are summer flowers flying everywhere and photos twisting and turning all over the place. Go on take a look. I'm even admitting to myself that it looks a bit wacky but I'm loving it too!
I'm hoping that it gets the message across that these are meant for fun, for fun in the summer sun
Well I am truly addicted to creating these little mosaic charts. There is a certain knack, which took me a time to crack but now I have I am away. There are designs that are impossible to recreate with mosaics due to its limitations. For example I tried to create a "heart" design a few weeks ago and gave up after a few hours of tearing my hair out. But now I think I have it sussed, learning to work with its limits and to use them as benefits. Anyway with a lot of practise I came up with 3 new mosaic charts, all of them inspired by nature and the yarn colours I had bought specially for this project. All of the charts are available in my newest pattern , yes 3 patterns in one!
Buy it on Ravelry here http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/summer-lovin---3-mosaic-charted-pillows Flower Power was inspired by the Fuschia colourway, I wanted something pretty, feminine and flowery. Flowers are difficult with mosaic work as it doesn't tend to work with flowery curves. Bit I think these funky square flowers are ace! Honey Pot was named after I knit this design, it reminded me of bees bussing round the honey pots. Leafy Greens was developed to portray a leafy shape, the pine tree just emerged by accident! that's the joy of mosaic work, you just don't know what's going to emerge sometime.
I finally gave in and purchased the Mosaic knitting bible !
It seems there are not that many books out there on the subject and I thought to try and get my learning done a bit more fast paced I would purchase the book. Little did I realise at the time that the book came from USA and took over a month to get here , Oh well that's another story. Wow! what a book. Tons and tons of charted patterns. Just a pity all were done in black and white , I expected a some what colourful book , given the book cover and the title. Barbara explains the technique very well though and I was very pleasantly surprised at the volume of patterns. Today I tried one of them out , making sure that I fully understood how to read the chart. This is the basket weave pattern you can find on page 23 of Barbara's book.
No doubt I will be sneaking quite a few of these in to my work in the future.
Since I first found out about Mosaic knitting, probably around 2 months ago, I have been been teaching myself all about it, researching what little information there is on the Internet, trying out those few free knitting patterns that used this technique, re-engineering charts to understand how they work and generally getting to grips with the whole subject.
I ended up ordering the "Mosaic Knitting" book by Barbara G Walker but because it was out of print here in the UK, it came flying over from the USA and took around 4 weeks to arrive . And during those 4 weeks, what did I do? Yes I carried on researching and trying things out. I was a little impatient to learn this wonderful technique.
The book was great to get , it confirmed everything I had worked out and it had tons of mosaic charts to use.
However in those few weeks of waiting I had worked out how to design and chart up my own! Woop!, which meant when I designed and wrote up a knitting pattern I could honestly say the design is mine , totally mine !
Today's mosaic masterpiece isn't finished yet but I just had to show it to you. I have been amazed by the colour's that are on display from the one ball of Noro yarn (Aya)
The finished article will be available in my on-line shop soon and I will be writing up the knitting pattern too.
1st March , cushion is finished and knitting pattern written and tested
