Knitting the Seasons--December--Looking for Colour in Snow

The first skiff of snow was on December 7th--a nice dusting of snow in our front yard.

An Alberta spruce on the left and a blue spruce on the right.

It was nice to be working in blues for a change!

A stocking stitch swatch with alternating rows of blues and gradually changing to greens with  random single stitches of white.  Some of the white stitches were purled from the wrong side so as to appear as flecks of snow.

Extracting a repeating motif from the tip of the blue spruce branches.

Embroidered branch of blue spruce.

By the 14th of December we'd had a few dumps of snow.

The blue spruce with clumps of snow.

As the month progressed, I was depending more and more on the white yarns in my stash, and discovered that I have very few bright whites.  Most of my collection is either wool, wool blends or alpaca and so is more yellow-white than bleached white.

Tramping around the yard in mid-December I spotted our ornamental crab apple tree.

Here is a photo of one of the crabapple swatches in-situ:

I had fun with 3 and 4 stitch bobbles in this one.

And the rest of the Crabapple swatches:

The crabapple swatches photographed on the branches of the tree.

The December collection.

One of the reasons I was keen to get my "Knitting the Seasons" work posted on this blog is that I'm just about to distribute the brochure for the 15th annual Okanagan Knitting Retreat.  Yes, it will be #15 on May 23-27, 2013.  Never in our wildest dreams did we (me, Wendy and Gloria) think that this retreat would become such an institution.  

At this retreat I will be leading a workshop that I'm calling "Inspirations from Nature" which has emerged from my current explorations.  It's amazing to discover the multitude of colours that can be extracted from an object such as a rock or an apple.  And then to work with those colours in a variety of stitch patterns to create something unique yet still reminiscent of the original object.