Wrapping up the Knitting the Seasons project (July--Alaska).

And so here is my final posting in this year-long project that I called Knitting the Seasons.  Regular readers will know that I started in August 2012 by choosing Blackberries as the theme, and spent the month of August "knitting" blackberries and their leaves.   (If you want to read all the posts in this series, click on the label "knitting the seasons" on the screen left.)

Back to the business at hand...

When packing up for our Alaska adventure at the end of June, I decided that I was going to knit "en plein air" while in Alaska.  This meant second-guessing what colours I'd need, because unlike a painter who can mix the right colour on his/her palette, I had to work with what I packed.

I assembled an assortment of greens, blue-greens, and blues as well as a few browns and other neutrals in anticipation of the ocean and rain forest.  This is the first time I had selected the yarns in advance of identifying the colours in a landscape.

Knitting in the solarium on the upper deck of the ferry.  The yellow fibreglas windows made this a bit of a challenge!

The result--A simple Alaskan landscape.

Knitting on the rocks at Bartlett Cover in Glacier Bay

Selecting the yarns

Getting started

The completed "rock beach" swatch, done mostly as short rows rather than intarsia or fair-isle.

Leaning over the edge of the railing--the ferry wake.

Interpreting the wake of the ferry in a random honeycomb pattern.

A calm day on the ferry

Another landscape from the ferry.  I found it hard to knit fast enough!  I started with observing the landscape above, and then by the time I got to the mountains, there were some higher peaks behind, so I added them in too.

Alaskan swatches.

Reflections about Knitting en plein air:   I didn't have quite the right colours with me, and found that I was looking for landscapes that matched my supply instead.  I also felt a little uncomfortable knitting in public on the ferry, fearing that I'd be asked what I was doing...and having to stop and explain.  It's way easier to knit socks in public!

Knitting the Seasons...June...A rose

I can't quite believe it, but I'm on the verge of catching up my postings of this year-long project.  The theme for June was a beautiful rose in a friend's garden.

Day One

Day 2

Day 3

By Day 4, the rose had wilted, however I had knit a good-sized swatch.

Rose bud swatch

The June collection of swatches.

The rose garden.

I'm off to Alaska for three weeks, and will be trying something new for the July theme.  I've second-guessed the colours of the ocean and rain forest, and have packed a variety of small amounts of greens, blue-greens, blues, and blue-violets.  I hope to be knitting en plein air (which gives a new meaning to the knit stitch, a.k.a. "plain knitting"...)

Knitting the Seasons...May...Tulips

Daffodils predominate in our garden in April, and by May the tulips have taken over.  We had a lovely array of reds.  Many have cross-pollinated and so are striped.  The centres are interesting--black, violet and yellow.

Back yard tulips

Tulip with a yellow centre.

Using the yellow-centred tulip as a repeat motif.

Tulip with a violet centre.

Playing around with a Fair Isle motif from a book by Mary Jane Mucklestone, plus a corrugated ribbing in tulip colours.

Knitting the Seasons...April...Spring!

Continuing to catch up on old business...  I skipped this project in February and March, picking up the strands with the onset of spring.  The colours in our garden were wonderful yellows (daffodils, forsythia, tulips, balsamroot, and dandelions--not too many of the latter since I dig them out whenever I see them), greens (foliage--dull, bright, yellow-green, light green, dark green) and blue-violet (hyacinths, grape hyacinth, and scilia).

This is a favourite view of our rock garden.  Lloyd calls this the "dry creek bed" and planted it with grape hyacinths to mimic the flow of water.  One of my jobs this spring was pulling out all the hyacinths which had spread (by seed) to other parts of the garden.

Auditioning the colours in-situ.

April swatches

A particularly nice grouping.

Arrowleaf Balsamroot, a.k.a. Okanagan sunflower.  This  perennial plant is a harbinger of spring in the Okanagan.  It has a very long tap root and thus impossible to transplant.  The root was an important traditional food for the local First Nations.  Lloyd harvested seeds in the wild and planted them in the garden.  It takes about 4 - 5 years before the first shoots are seen above ground.

My knitted version.

Knitting the Seasons...January...Snow! Texture in Snow!

I'm catching up this week with my "Knitting the Seasons" posts now that my liturgical work is finished for the moment.  This posting is about January.  It was difficult to settle on a theme for January because the landscape didn't look much different than in December...snow, and lots of it!  While there wasn't a lot of fresh snow, it was cold and the snow hung around...but became quite crystaline, and so I settled on a theme of Texture in Snow.  Looking out my window I saw depressions where the snow had collapsed either due to the topography or footsteps...layers, ridges and valleys of snow.

Our front yard mid-January--lumps and bumps from the plants and rocks underneath.

Random cables and crossings.

Road grit and snow

Road grit:  Random knits and purls with a variety of neutrals

Road grit:  Double moss stitch

Tire tracks were another source of inspiration...

And it sure wasn't easy trying to represent these tracks in knits and purls:

Another try, with another kind of tire track...

Still not feeling very successful, and so I thought that I would tackle these same themes but knitting with more texture such as found in twisted and travelling stitches...but that will have to wait a while.  I took a break from this project in February and March for some time out with my family, but I got back at it in April.  I'll post about that next.

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.