Inspiration
One Design, Two Moods
Dear Kay,
I think I’ve expressed to you how obsessed I’ve been with Cecelia Campochiaro’s sequence knitting. I mean: I finished an entire blanket of sequence knitting in eight weeks.
I find it soothing and meditative, this simple concept of knit and purl stitches worked in patterns that end up being magically complex. I don’t have to be a brainiac to make it all happen. It is the goshdarnedest thing.
And it looks beautiful in yarns that are luxurious or rustic.
Today I’d like to share just a quick look at what happens when Cecelia’s Corrugated Wrap from Field Guide No. 5: Sequences is made using two very different yarns.
In the Field Guide, we feature Amor Valdez’s Crave Caravan.
It is the slinkiest, drapiest, most luxurious blend: 70% merino, 10% cashmere, 10% mulberry silk, and 10% camel. I feel like a million bucks when I wear this wrap. Amor’s yarn makes this into a treasure to wear forever.
As lush as this is, I had to try a Corrugated Wrap using rustic yarns. During the dim days of winter, I received a gift from the cargo gods when Marcia MacDonald airlifted me a batch of her plant-dyed yarn, Lana Plantae.
I tried out three shades made from marigold, cochineal, and osage orange. The effect is completely different—it’s that mood where you want to don your barn jacket, festoon your rustic Corrugated Wrap about the neck, and go out in the back yard and chop firewood. Or, more likely, go stack the artisanally chopped wood that the nice guy sitting in his truck outside Sperry’s brought to your back yard.
We have Crave Caravan in the Shop, and four skeins will make a Corrugated Wrap for the ages. I can easily imagine this project going with me on a trip this summer—no size to worry about, one glorious color to watch.
We have Lana Plantae in the Shop as well, in a DK weight that allows you to cast on fewer stitches and create a Corrugated Wrap with a larger gauge than the pattern calls for—a speedy Corrugated Wrap.
Indigo, Osage, Sumac, Cochineal
This might be my next scheme. The hot pink that Marcia cooked up is so extravagant and wild that I can’t believe the dye came from the tiny bugs known as cochineal.
And the Rambouillet wool is soft and delicious to the touch. They are not a scratchy breed, the Rambouillets. They obviously keep the Breck Fleece Conditioner at hand at all times.
Love,
Ann
Those pictures were such a tease. We want more pictures of the new wrap! (And maybe the fire wood delivery guy. Ha!)
This pattern has been in my queue for quite a bit – didn’t think about using DK. Let me recheck my stash. It’s really quite beautiful.
I have been working on a Corrugated wrap using 100% cashmere (Colourmart, out of my stash), and I strongly recommend it. There is just enough going on, with new sequences to try, to keep boredom from setting in, but each sequence becomes so automatic that you can mindlessly knit with friends or watch a movie with subtitles. Unfortunately, you also threw the Logalong at me, and my summer logcabin top has taken over my knitting life! Way too many ideas and inspirations thown at me almost at once! (I must confess that a little sequence knitting has crept into the top)
A cashmere Corrugated sounds pretty divine! Glad to hear you’re enjoying sequence knitting. It really is the sort of project you can keep going in a simmering way—you know, knit a log cabin square, knit a sequence. And when they converge, wow . . .
how many yards of dk did it take? Love the rustic look
The Lana Plantae version here uses fingering weight yarn, 1,600 yards to make it. To make a DK version, you have to decide whether you want the wrap to be made as written in the pattern or whether you want to modify it by casting on fewer stitches. (I don’t have the time to rewrite the pattern with fewer stitches, so I’ll give my estimate for working this pattern with a larger yarn but with the pattern as written.) If you use DK and work the pattern as written, the wrap will be about 20″ wide rather than the 15″ of the original pattern. And it will be quite a bit longer than the 78″ original pattern length—and 78″ is really long. But the easy thing about this pattern is that you can just stop knitting when the wrap is as long as you like. My estimate for how much DK to use to make this pattern as written? Probably 1,400 yards for a 20″ x 78″ wrap.
Oh that Crave Caravan looks like just the thing I want to knit instead of slogging through a linen pullover for my sister. Careful cutting wood with that long drapey wrap! At my wood cutter’s request I made him a twisted cowli-ish sort of neck warmer. He said “You should write this up and call it ‘Safety First’ –
How do I get a pattern? Roxane Telesha
Hi Roxane! The Corrugated Wrap pattern appears in Mason-Dixon Knitting Field Guide No. 5: Sequences, available in two editions: a print edition with ebook download code printed in the book, or ebook-only. Here’s where you can order your copy:
https://www.moderndailyknitting.com/shop/mason-dixon-knitting-field-guide-no-5-sequences/
You are awesome!!! I love reading your antics!
I’m trying to figure out the difference between sequence knitting and…knitting. I get the repetitive pattern of knits and purls, but aren’t those just stitch patterns like the stitch patterns that have been around for a long time and people have used forever?
Good question! No, it’s actually much cooler than just the patterns of yore–it’s all explained in Cecelia’s book Sequence Knitting and in our Field Guide No. 5, but the idea that a knit-purl pattern can continue around the edge of a fabric without interruption is pretty much Cecelia’s original idea. And her variations on this idea make for a different sort of knit-purl pattern–the textures can become extremely complex but without any chart-following or complicated counting. It is really fun and amazing to work sequence knitting.