Michele Rose Orne - Inspired to Knit: Creating Exquisite Handknits

Creating Exquisite Handknits

Michele Rose Orne

To Jack, Katherine, James, and Andrew

Follow Your Dreams! You Can Do Anything in Life If You Set Your Mind to It!

Turning this book into a reality has been a long-standing goal of mine and bringing the concept to life depended on the work and support of many others.

To my husband, Matt, and our children Jack, Katherine, James, and Andrewthanks for your love, support, and understanding of my many late nights sitting at the computer and my bringing along knitting wherever we went. Thanks for eating at the kitchen counter for more than a year while the dining-room table was covered with knitting stuff and for putting up with a wife and mother who is always knitting.

To my friendsthanks for all your encouragement and support!

To my wonderful and considerably talented knittersthank you for taking so much care in helping to develop these patterns and for all your patient efforts and willingness to work through the inevitable flaws of the initial designs: Grace Beverly, Ann Dill, Lucinda Heller, Anne McLaughlin, Jeanne Moran, Aloisia Pollack, Karen Ressel, Alison Walsh, Donna Warnell, and Kelly Young.

To my knitting industry friends who supplied yarns, information, and support: Pam Allen, Elaine Eskesen, Pat Chew, Nancy Thomas, Margery Winter, Veronik Avery, Susan Mills, Linda Niemeyer, Helene Rush, Kirstin Muench, Judith Shangold, and Linda Braley.

To the editors and staff at Interweave: It was a pleasure to work with such an accomplished teamfrom the initial creative brainstorming all the way through the technical editing, your encouragement, patience, and support were invaluable! Its been a pleasure to have such talent help bring my vision to life.

Where does inspiration come from? Those who create often look to the world around them for inspirationto the work of other artists, to nature, and to their own creative spirits to come up with new expressions. They find new ways to interpret what they see and reinvent it in their chosen medium. My medium is knitting. Just as a painter uses paint and a sculptor uses clay, I create with yarn.

If youre like many knitters, choosing a pattern and yarn may provide more than enough challenge. How, then, can you learn to think more creativelyto make adjustments to an existing pattern or design your own? Knitters are often beholden to the written patternto exactly what appears on the page. Gripped by the fear of making a mistake and handicapped by a lack of knowledge about the basic concepts that go into creating a pattern, theyre at the mercy of designs and patterns that others have created. I want to show you howeven if you have no design experienceyou can find inspiration in your surroundings and translate that inspiration into your own knitting.

For this book, Ive developed four short workshops to help you find inspiration and shape that inspiration into your own garments. Through these workshops, Ill guide you in gathering ideas, developing a color palette, knitting swatches, and sketching a silhouette for your own inspired projects. Along the way, youll learn how I used these steps to develop four collections of projects that follow seasonal themes.

Although I make a living as a designer, Ive never taken a single knitting or knitwear design class. My approach has evolved over twenty-five years of designing and knitting both professionally and personally, and its based on a lot of trial and error. And I still make mistakes and rip out my worksometimes entire sweaters that havent turned out as I hoped. And I often alter my designs midstream, if the knitted stitches dont behave as I envisioned. I tell you this so youll know that its okay to make mistakes and try new things. If you dont, youll miss out on a lot of exciting design opportunities.

Ive provided a wide range of projects in this book because I know that different types of knitting appeal to different knitters. Some are drawn to single-color projects, some to cables, some to lace, and some to color work. Depending on where your comfort lies, some projects may seem daunting. My intention, however, isnt to overwhelm you with techniques and complexity, but to show you the range of effects that you can achieve through knittingand challenge you to learn something new. In so doing, youll begin to think more like a designer and have the necessary tools to alter existing patterns and create your own designs.

To me, the knitters year begins in autumn. Autumn is all about harvesting, saving, and collecting. Its about savoring the light as days get shorter, about soaking up the warmth of Indian summer days, and about preparing for the long gray coldness ahead. Its a time when I come indoors and begin to think about richly colored sweater coats, shawls, hats, wraps, and gloves to stave off the chill. Im attracted to nature-inspired palettes of wools, alpacas, and cashmeres that beg to be combined in Fair Isle and intarsia designs. My design choices tend to focus on color-work patterns that reflect the deep, saturated colors that blanket the countryside. Im drawn to classic yarnsheathered alpacas, vegetable-dyed handspun wools, tweeds, marls, and other natural blendsin hues of gold-toned neutrals, vibrant reds and oranges, rich browns, and woodsy greens. I love to collect leaves, pinecones, grasses, seedpods, and dried flowers for texture and color ideas. I like to arrange them in different designs and patterns that inspire my knittingits color palettes, textures, and shapes.

In September, I always find renewed interest in knitting inspired by the spectacular colors of the New England landscape. My design palette is filled with warm tonesamber, coral, gold, pumpkin, sienna, and umberthat my surroundings evoke: a field of hay drying in the late afternoon sun, a simmering pot of squash soup, dried grasses along the roadside.

In October, the colors of the harvest are abundant. The leaves are all shades of red, orange, burgundy, chartreuse, bright yellow, then finally brown. Farm stands, fields, and orchards are filled with pumpkins, squash, and apples. Days are crisp, nights are cold, and even the colors of the dying plants in the garden are of interest. Octobers palette is rich and saturated, centering on all shades of red and orange. The shapes and colors of leaves provide ideas for textured stitches and Fair Isle patterns.

In November, the days get shorter and colors fade from the landscape. Everything has gone to seed. Chestnuts and acorns litter the roadside while cattails and tall grasses stand out against blustery blue-gray skies. Golds give way to beiges and browns; reds turn to burgundies and plums; greens dry and fade. Geese fly south across the gray sky creating V-shaped patterns. The palette darkens considerably.