Color, Color Everywhere

The other class I took at Vogue Knitting Live was called Slip Sliding Away, and it centered around using slipped stitches to create interesting texture and color combinations.  Melissa Leapman, a famous designer, taught the class in her characteristically laid back, slightly funny, almost meditative way.

Now, this class came with homework.  That's right, homework.  I felt like I was back in college.  Even worse, the homework was boring.  We had to knit 5 test swatches, each a different color, of 21-25 stitches (respectively), in K1P1 ribbing for one inch.  Uggh, so boring.  But I faithfully knit the swatches in the ugliest colors in my scraps bin because those are the scraps with the most yardage.  Look what they became:

Sorry for your eyeballs.

The first swatch played with texture.  Each row moves the slipped stitch over just a tad so that these zigzag patterns emerge in the fabric.

Oooh!

The second swatch is also a texture piece, with elongated stitches creating little boxes that stick up slightly.  I'd love to do a baby blanket with this stitch pattern.

Aaahh!

Then we started to get into playing with color.  Swatch three used three colors, but only one color was worked with at a time.  It made a sort of chevron pattern that looks like a castle to me, but it was way easier than actual chevron with much less counting involved.  I might use this technique to make a hat.

Wow!

Next is this sort of dragon scale stitch.  It doesn't look so great in the swatch, but the samples that the teacher brought were fantastic!

Mmmmmm!

The last stitch we practiced is definitely not something I'm likely to use.  It has cables between columns of colorwork.  Obviously, it's awful with the colors I used (thank you, scrap bin), but even the samples Leapman brought didn't really wow me.  It might be good to use in a man's sweater pattern, but even then it's a bit too much work for the result.

...eeeww...

I would definitely recommend this class to anyone who wants to learn these techniques.  Even if you think you could easily eyeball these swatches and reproduce the stitches, it's still worth your time and money because of how incredibly inspiring it is.  She blew our minds with some of the stitches she's come up with, some of the different ways we can play with color, and it's all so much easier than you'd imagine.  

If you're interested in learning more about these techniques, I would highly suggest Leapman's books, Color Knitting the Easy Way and The Knit Stitch Pattern Handbook, which includes 300 (three-freaking-hundred!) different stitches you can make with knitting.