Color Craze for a Rainy Day

Today I want to share a comforting knit I finished a few months ago. It was the kind of project you pick up on a rainy, cold day and work on it for hours until you must reluctantly set it down to feed your resentful family. This is Tamy Gore‘s Color Craze and is my new favorite shawl. It’s a good weight for our winters.

All of her patterns have the perfect mix of elements to keep a knitter interested while still being a chill knit. With Color Craze it is brioche, striping, eyelets, and garter. It’s all in there but not daunting. It was totally enjoyable. There was no fretting or worrying about fixing mistakes because the pattern camouflaged them really well.

This pattern sat in my library a while as I pondered what mini skeins I would get in the right yardage to match the sample. Then I saw Molly of A Homespun House talking about hers and how she simply used one of her 10 gram mini sets in place of the four varying amounts of contrast colors recommended in the pattern. Rather than worrying about starting a new contrast color where indicated in the pattern, she just worked the first mini skein in her set for any section that required a contrast color until it was used up, then tied in the next mini in the set to use as the CC until it was used up, etc. She did this through the whole set and it looked fine, even where their was a mini skein color change mid-brioche section.

This is my kind of laid back knitting. So I wound up a magic cake of my Rustic Mini set, using magic knots to tie one skein to the next. Can I just say that making a magic cake is a special kind of satisfying. I paired it with some Knit Picks Hawthorne Tonal in Silverton from stash and began knitting.

At first I planned to pair it with some lace weight mohair/ silk yarn, but I felt it muted the depth of these tonals too much, so I ripped the bit I’d knit back and omitted the lace weight yarn. This let the subtle variance of each mini skein and the Silverton shine. Silverton is one of my favorite colorways from Knit Picks, but I pretty much love everything in the tonal Hawthorne line.

Details: I used a US size 3 needle and about 1 1/3 skeins of Knit Picks Hand Painted Tonal Hawthorne in the Silverton colorway along with a set of ten 10g Rustic mini skeins from A Homespun House.

This photo sums up how I feel about my yarn/ pattern combo. It makes me think of a rainbow on a drizzly day: calm and subdued, but comforting.

I did finish my last mini skein just a few rows shy of the end of the shawl, so I just used the main color yarn as a border edge. I actually like the way that looks, so it was all good.

I also was super responsible and wove in my ends as I worked for my #EndweavingParty.

What I love about Color Craze:
I like the fact that you can be flexible about where to change your contrast colors and the shawl still looks great. I also love that it has the right balance of brioche and garter for conversation knitting. Another plus is that I can wear it upside down (my preference) or wrong side out and it still looks good.

In my last podcast episode I talked about the significance of Tamy’s business name, Narrow Path Designs and how meaningful it is to me. You can find the episode here. But, in short, I’ll just say I’ve never been disappointed by anything I’ve found along the way on the Narrow Path, either figuratively or literally, and it’s cool to make something with that in mind. Below is an example of one such rewarding, literal narrow path we took in the Grand Tetons. The other type is visible in positive changes I see in myself and a growing love for other people.

Which of Tamy’s patterns have you knit?

I can’t decide which one I want to do next. I’ve had my heart set on Milu for some time but it would be a very vibrant color combo, whereas right now I’m liking the idea of some soft spring colors from Six and Seven Fiber mixed with all of the texture and lace of Ashbrook. This would also leave me with some leftovers to add to my scrappy granny stripe blanket, which I’ve pulled out again because… quarantine netflix with subtitles.