Warmth: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

| Naomi Parkhurst

The word I drew from my word hoard for this stitch pattern is Warmth, suggested by Nim on Patreon. Warmth is a happy word for me, and is part of why I love knitting.

Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. I make two of these into knitting stitches each month: the first is drawn from the collection of new words; the second is drawn from the collection of unused words. A random number generator helps me choose these, and then I get to work, first turning the letters into numbers, then charting the numbers onto grids in various ways. Finally, when I make the chart into lace, I turn the marked squares into yarnovers and work out where to place the corresponding decreases. (I usually make lace; occasionally I make cables instead.) I also make a chart for any craft that uses a square grid for designing; this goes in a separate post.

The stitch patterns are not meant in any way to look like the original words; the words are the seeds of my creativity.

Follow link for charts and instructions

Bird: a free mosaic knitting stitch pattern

Bird: a free mosaic knitting stitch pattern, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

A while back, I encoded the word Bird and made it into lace. For this week’s post, I reworked one of the code grids I made while planning that post and turned it into a mosaic knitting stitch pattern. (I used the process described in this post.)

The nice thing about mosaic knitting is that the charts are similar to the final appearance of the knitting, so I’m not going to provide a swatch this time. Mosaic knitting looks difficult, but it’s really easy to do! Basically, knit two-row stripes, and slip stitches from the row below to make the contrasting pattern. If you can knit stripes, you can knit mosaic patterns.

Here’s a detailed blog post I wrote about how it works.

Continue reading →

Cariad: a free needlework chart for any craft

Cariad: a free needlework chart for any craft, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

The random number generator picked Cariad for my first encoded word post of this month, suggested by Sarah Dawn, one of my Patreon supporters. Cariad means love in Welsh.

I liked this chart as a band pattern, rather than an allover one, but it might work well allover if every other horizontal repeat were offset halfway.

I usually develop a complicated knitting stitch pattern for each word, but I also like to provide a basic chart for any craft that’s worked on a grid: beads, cross stitch, whatever. I also try to provide an image of the pattern repeated all over not as a chart. It doesn’t necessarily look like a finished object for any particular craft, but I just want to give a sense of it in use.

Continue reading →

Cariad: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

Cariad lace: a free lace knitting stitch pattern, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

The word I drew from my word hoard for this stitch pattern is Cariad, suggested by Sarah Dawn on Patreon. Cariad is a Welsh word meaning love or sweetheart.

Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. Starting this month, I’ll make three of these into knitting stitches each month: two drawn from the collection of new words and the third drawn from the collection of unused words. A random number generator helps me choose these, and then I get to work, first turning the letters into numbers, then charting the numbers onto grids in various ways. Finally, when I make the chart into lace, I turn the marked squares into yarnovers and work out where to place the corresponding decreases. (I usually make lace; occasionally I make cables instead.) I also make a chart for any craft that uses a square grid for designing; this goes in a separate post.

The stitch patterns are not meant in any way to look like the original words; the words are the seeds of my creativity.

Follow link for charts and instructions

Bird: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

Bird: a free lace knitting stitch pattern, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

The word I drew from my word hoard for this stitch pattern is Bird, suggested by Catnach on Patreon. I’ve been a casual birdwatcher for a lot of my life. Recently, there have been goldfinches eating flower seeds in our garden, and that makes me happy.

Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. I make two of these into knitting stitches each month: the first is drawn from the collection of new words; the second is drawn from the collection of unused words. A random number generator helps me choose these, and then I get to work, first turning the letters into numbers, then charting the numbers onto grids in various ways. Finally, when I make the chart into lace, I turn the marked squares into yarnovers and work out where to place the corresponding decreases. (I usually make lace; occasionally I make cables instead.) I also make a chart for any craft that uses a square grid for designing; this goes in a separate post.

The stitch patterns are not meant in any way to look like the original words; the words are the seeds of my creativity.

Follow link for charts and instructions

Blog slowdown

| Naomi Parkhurst

I find myself with a lot of writing and design projects I want to finish quickly, so I’m going to take the next month or so easy as far as blog posts, aside from my Patreon stitch patterns.

One of the design projects is a fundraiser shawl, and I think I’ll try to share my progress with that on a weekly basis, as there’s no reason to keep it secret. Here’s how things are going so far!

Yarn is BC Garn Bio Shetland.

Mosaic stitch pattern is Help, encoded.

The fundraiser might change in the future, but for the foreseeable future, money will be split between RAICES and a local immigrant justice group (I need to do the research on that one).