Punch-card Play with Snowflake Pattern
For the holiday season, I designed this snowflake pattern and wanted to show you a few ways to use a pattern with color. The techniques I used here are all covered in the Patterning class. You can download this snowflake pattern from the link below, and play around with it yourself.
Making the punch card
My first job was to punch out the card. Out of sheer laziness, I don’t usually bother to mark the pattern on the card – just start punching! This inevitably leads to some mistakes that need patching. A little bit of Magic Tape does the job, and I used some punched out ‘holes’ to fill the mistakes. In this way, I only need to tape one side of the card.
I only had enough room to punch out two repeats of the pattern, but as long as the card is long enough to connect when it is in the machine, it doesn’t matter how long it is. If you have an extra-long pattern, you can snap two or more cards together. Here I punched out two rows of holes after the second repeat and then cut the rest off. The two rows of holes will allow the card to overlap in the machine and the pattern to be read through those two rows.
On the machine, I ran the card through to make sure everything looked okay. I can see one mistake where I had taped over a hole, but not very well. So I fixed that.
Color Exploration
I ran off a whole series of repeats using two colors, first in neutrals and then in the red family, and then in blues. Laying them next to each-other, I thought how nice they would look patched together in a scarf, or small blanket. Just knit strips and then link them together.
Isolating the pattern with color play
Now I wanted to isolate just one repeat of the pattern. If you need a reminder on how to do this, you will find it in the Patterning Class: Complex Fairisles I - Planning Color Changes. I knit a few repeats, adding an extra color each time.
Then I went a bit crazy with color! The third one got a bit screwed up. It fell off the machine part way through. Did swearing occur? Maybe. I rehung it but then re-programmed the machine on the wrong row. I didn’t notice until it was off the machine. Actually, I don’t care at this point – I am only looking at the color.
I love all three of these! They just make me feel happy.
My grandmother started a hand-knitting business during the second world war, while grandad was in a POW in Italy. She bought wool from Shetland and knit accessories. She knitted the berets and my mum knitted the mitts to match. I feel like all of that fairisle colourwork has been passed on through DNA.
I had this idea in the back of my mind to treat the fairisle as if it was a solid block of color, more or less ignoring the pattern and stripe it with other colors. I love how this turned out to and could see it used in a big wrap or a sweater. It would look great in a bulky/chunky gauge too. Normally, I wouldn’t combine fairisle with jersey since the fairisle will be narrower than the jersey, but these are small stripes and I don’t think it would be a problem. If they were deeper areas of jersey, I would carry on using the punch-card but use two yarns the same color, so the stripe areas become solid
One last experiment. This one is more feminine in the choice of color. Again, isolating the pattern and knitting each repeat in a different color.
