Carol Feller - Ep. 80 - Fruity Knitting

[Music] [Music] welcome to fruity knitting this is episode 80 I'm Andrew and I'm Andrea we hope you're enjoying this summer and that it's not too hard for your knitting no matter where you are in the world we've got a very amazing knitter coming up in the show today she knits many hours a day despite living in a very warm climate she's only been knitting for around seven years but in that time she's knitted over 80 lace dresses they're all her own design based on lace doily patterns and sometimes lace shawl patterns yeah that's Tatiana or touch Yana car who's our guest on knitters of the world and what she's doing with knitting really is amazing its original and very unusual so you're going to totally love it and then we have our feature interview with Irish designer Carol feller and carol has got so much of interest to say that we have split her interview up into two parts and each part is like a mini knitting masterclass so to give you an example in part one Carol categorizes the various types of gradient yarns that are available and then she shows us how to use them best from a designing perspective and then later in part two we really go deeply into short rows and carol compares four different short row methods and then shows us which method works best for different types of projects which is fantastic so she's been a knitwear designer now for over twelve years and during this time she's really gained a lot of experience both designing but also with teachings so we know that you're going to learn a tremendous amount during this interview which is exactly what we want and love yep we've also got a very short extreme knitting segment coming up we're going to give you an update on our projects and we're also announcing a new Cal yes we'll start with under construction and we'll look at my project first it's the st. lunare go to k by jennifer bill and this is the project that I'm doing and it's very drapey very drapey there yeah so I'm knitting this in the nature's luxury yarn on stage long the trash which is a blend of wool silk and camel and this really pretty spring colorway is called legends of the fall so what I want to do first of all is show you a picture of the original design so when I'm talking about modifications you actually know what I'm talking about so here it is here it's knitted bottom up in the round with a basket weave eyelet pattern that's all over the body and the sleeves and it has a really lovely panel of twisted stitch cables that runs up each side of the body as well as on the inside of the sleeves and then you've got a stranded colorwork section on the yoke and if you look at closely at the yoke you can see that it sits quite deeply and it's sitting deeply because jennifer has given the body quite a lot of positive ease so it's got about three inches or seven point five centimeters of positive ease so last episode I've spoken quite a lot of detail about putting in body shaping because I like mine to be slightly more fitted and here it is here I've knitted right up to the arm holes here so that's the whole body apart done and you can see if we hold it straight that there is just a very gentle shaping going on here on both sides so that's been successful I didn't want to put my shaping in the sides width increases and decreases because I didn't want to interfere with this really beautiful twisted stitch cable panel that Jennifer has running down the sides so I decided to do my shaping by changing needle size which has the same effect in most cases so I started off down here with three millimeter needles and then I decreased my needle size until I got to two millimeters right around the waist and I did that in quarter of a millimeter increments so I started on three millimeters went down to two point seven five two point five two point two five and then two millimeters and then I gradually increased my needle size back up again but I only increased up to two point seven five because I want the bust slightly smaller than the hips so that's worked there it is and what's been really good which it's not always the case is that changing my needle size up and down hasn't optically interfered with the patterning so the basket-weave eyelet pattern here you can't see that it's smaller around the waist than it is around the bust or the hips which is cool and the same goes for the twisted stitch cable pattern if I hold it like this hopefully you can see that you can't really see that I mean there's a small difference here but it's not doesn't really stand out so that's great I've got away with it the other thing I wanted to say is that when you're changing needle size that'll affect the stitch gauge which gives you that's alright you can it now thanks which gives you the width of the garment but it also changes the row gauge which gives you the length so I had to actually add on a couple of extra pattern repeats to give me the length that I wanted but I'm very pleased it's worked out and there it is and I'm now on to the sleeves and the sleeves I've done some modifications on too so I'll show you again a picture of Jennifers sleeves so you understand what I've done Jennifer has made her sleeves quite loose-fitting to match the loose-fitting body of the garment and you can see who has come down to just a little bit below the elbows and the hem of the sleeve is actually the same width as a circumference of the upper arm so because I've done my body more fitted I do need to do something slightly different with my sleeves so that my sleeves will match my body this is what I've done so far this is a sleeve and hopefully if I have enough yarn and I think I do I'm actually going to make my sleeves longer so probably five centimeters longer than what Jennifer's done and they'll come down to a true three-quarter length and I've also decided to do mine more fitted or at least the cuff is more fitted and if you have a look here if you can hold it with two hands like that Jennifer has done the same pattern that's on the hem of the body she's done on the sleeve cuff you can see it there which is really pretty it's a gorgeous little pattern and the first little modification I did was to make my sleeve cuff longer than what the pattern says so it's actually the same length as the hem on the body and I did that because I want my cuff to be very sort of stable and a little bit stronger and that's because it's going to sit very narrow or snugly around my my arm so what I did thanks so what I did was just figure out the stitch count that I needed so that this would sit snug around my arm and I knitted the pattern and then in the last row of the cuff I increased up probably about 30 stitches so I got to the correct stitch count for the basket weave pattern and the twisted stitch cable pattern here so the effect that it has is that it makes the sleeve look like a little blouse I'll put it on and you can see so there it is it's quite fitted here and it's just just gently blousy above it which i think looks really good and you can see that the inside of the sleeve is going to have the lovely twisted cable pattern here so it's a very elegant design and I'll probably do mine about that length like that so I'm really pleased with it I think it looks very pretty yep you like it too don't you it has been taking me a while to knit this like I sit down and I knit a good chunk and then I've actually only needed this match or a good chunk of time it does that's always my experience it's a little bit demo demoralizing but it's um yeah but it really does I feel like I've done a few hours on it and I'm only this much more it's because I'm knitting on 2.75 millimeters but hopefully by next episode I will have finished both sleeves and I would have joined them to the body and I will have started the yoke which brings me onto the yoke because I will be doing some slight modifications there as well this is the color that I've picked for my yoke it's the same blend or the same yarn it's onstage long the trash from nature's luxury and the color is horse whisperer now I bought this from a photo online and it's really hard to know exactly how dark a dark color is from a photo because they always shown lights on it when they're taking photos of it and I'm concerned that it's actually going to be too dark if you can remember back to the original pattern Jennifer uses a dark charcoal color and her main body and the contrasting pattern color here is quite a light gray speckled yarn but her still looks very harmonious and balanced and I'm concerned that mine's gonna look too heavy because if you remember that above the stranded colorwork you've got quite a long section of of stocking stitch and I'm thinking this just might look too heavy so I do have this color here which I think goes very pretty freshly with the the main body color it's also nature's luxury Donecker is the owner of nature's luxury and we met Danica and her horse whispering husband Phillip who's a horse trainer about two years ago and she gave me this gained as a gift I think it works it well it looks really pretty with this and it's the same yarn weight but it's a different blend it's 65% silk and 35% camel so I'm a little bit concerned that it's a that's got no wool in it if you remember back to our interview with Gillian merino she talks about camel as being very similar to our Packer it behaves very similar so but except for it's not quite as heavy and it has just a faint bit more elasticity which is a good thing so that's my hesitation with this yarn is that I'm worried that it's going to behave in a different way from the other yarn so what I've done is a swatch you're so good I am good well you kind of have to so there's my swatch and I might even put a picture over Andrew so you can see up close you can see that the dark color really shows off the patterning very well so I think in any other design that these two colors would work really well together but I still think that the if you can imagine that this tiny little section here or stopping stitch was a much larger section it would be quite heavy and that's so that is kind of confirmed my my feeling that it's too heavy on the top my concern apart from it being a different blend was that it's too light and you wouldn't see the patterning but I do actually think that you can see the patterning enough and it reminds me of Marie Wallens designs because you'll often find that she has intense patterns but she uses color tones that are closer together so it still looks very harmonious and and calming yeah so I think it might work that way but the other thing I've noticed you can see it probably here too is see how wider this is all done on the same needle gauge and you can see how wider this yarn blend behaves than this one so this one is sort of tighter and snugger and this one's way looser so I'm gonna have to really play around with my needle size to make sure that I don't stuff up yeah so that's this project that's the update yeah coming up now is part one of our interview with Carol fella you may know Carol from her wonderful knit alongs but even if you don't I'm sure this interview is gonna be a real treat yeah [Music] you [Music] [Music] welcome to fruity knitting joining me now is a well-known knitwear designer from Island man if you will know Carol fella who's based in Cork carol has been a full time independent hand knit designer for 12 years now which means that she's seen a lot of changes and is very experienced at adapting herself and her business in a very fast changing industry Carol regularly teaches at festivals and retreats she's published several books and three years ago she brought out her own yarn called newer carol has been on fruit in knitting very briefly before when I did a very short interview with her during the 2018 Eden breanne festival she's a very clever lady with lots of interesting things to say so I knew that I wanted to have her on the show again for a feature interview and that has finally happened so thank you so much Carol for agreeing to being on fruity knitting again oh it's a pleasure to be here thank you for having me on Carol could you fill out my introduction with just a brief summary of how you developed your skills and learn to craft and also mention any designers or authors who may have strongly influenced you during that process oh yeah certainly I think well like most little designers a very few of us actually set out to do knitwear design as a career it's usually something you fall into accidentally and you've often gathered I think a whole series of skills to start with that end up folding into one with that and in my case when I left school I couldn't really decide what I wanted to do because I really liked art but I also like maths and science so to start with I ended up for a year in our college but missed very much the scientific end of things so ended up going on to do structural design and oddly enough the two of those end up playing in together very much from from a design point of view because obviously you know you need some creative end where you really are interested in the creative side and you sit down and you can envision something so without that to start with I don't think you ever are going to have a desire to be a designer to begin with but on the other side of us because it's all based on numbers because everything is about gauge and getting things to fit so you need to know the gauge to actually have an understanding of numbers and probably more importantly even an enjoyment of playing with numbers and putting them into spreadsheets is an enormous advantage definitely yeah I mean it can be done without that but I think it really it really does help I think so they're like those two are the initial two inputs I suppose and then as I've gone on in my career I've moved from designing into teaching which I think a lot of designers do end up start kind of morphing into teaching as well because you just get asked to more and more festivals and things like that and that's when I realized that other skills that I picked up along the way ended up coming into play because I had over my various different years of doing other things one of the things that I did was I was Alan hu League leader which is basically a parent to parent breastfeeding support person and we use lead meetings where we would facilitate and get the you know we wouldn't so much give advice as we would lead discussions and just point people and they're in the right direction and help when we could and so I think from that and actually being able to encourage and support people meant that I was very comfortable talking in public and more specifically kind of teaching but very much in that case a parent led but in this case initial Ed's kind of way of teaching so that's kind of I suppose the the three main influences that came into play from my background to help me with designing and with teaching yeah okay now can you say something very quickly about Barbara Walker because she said previously that she did influence you Barbara Walker would probably have been one of my influences when I started a teaching first of all and I started designing first of all and the reason for that is I think it really appeared appeal to the structural engineering side of me because she had a very structured approach to it in specific the book and missing from the top it's a very dense book with a lot of factual information in there talking about different ways that you can construct things specifically from the top down and that makes sense to me because with knitwear there is no reason to put it into pieces and seam it together because with that you're just trying to mimic sewn pieces where you're you know you're crushing your actual cloth out and you seaming it together but network design is way more flexible than that so Barbara Walker really appealed to me in in the sense that she she looked at it very differently and kind of tied with that as well Stephanie Chappell who I would have come across first of all from from Nissi magazine at the online magazine and she also she used to top-down construction and that was the first time I tried top down Raglan construction and I just found it absolutely fascinating because until you actually sit down and do it it doesn't make any sense you're looking at it on the paper you're like I don't understand how this works and then you get it on the needles and it's like a Eureka moment bit like the first time you turn the heel of a sock as well where it suddenly all comes together and you're like oh that makes sense and so both of those really had an enormous influence in the way that I yeah the way that I actually opposed my construction and my garments and my thinking of design together well you do use some really interesting and unusual constructions in your designs so can you just first of all tell us a little bit about your design aesthetic and then talk more about what you think your strengths are I think my design aesthetic I was kind of described it is simple but just one little bit of interest because generally speaking when I'm trying to pull a design together I'll have an initial idea and then you pare it back down so that is so basically it just it's simplified so that you're keeping one interesting feature and that way I think that it means that it's got a lot more impact but tied with that when I'm actually writing a pattern it's the construction and how it's put together and how the patterns written is just as important as the actual design so that the whole process for the nature is interesting and fun and it's not boring at any point so like one of this the first garment I've got here at this side is this is Ravi and it's probably a pretty good example of I suppose pared back design because it uses its top down and it's side-to-side so it starts at the yoke here going from side to side and so the benefit of that is that you actually get a really nice fitting neck because you've got short rows to shape the top and the bottom of it gets to be the size that it's supposed to be but only the yoke is from side to side from that point you're going to pick up stitches and you knit it from that point down and so that means that you can actually do shaping with the body and you can also make the sleeve so that you can shape the sleeves so each bit of us fits together so that it shapes the body very well but it's never going to be boring and when I started off first of all the action will lace feature I had in a few different places and in the end I just kind of cut them out and said you know I actually think just the one lace is going to work much better and you can't see it too well here but the back of it has also got a curve where you're using short rows again to curve the back of it and to just create a nice visual interest without being too complex or just adding too much visual fuzziness to us yeah I can see that there's going to ask you about that and I think you're right just the lace panel across that the yoke looks really really elegant and it's a very clever thing that you've done is to put the the way shaping or the body shaping where it's easy in in straight up-and-down knitting and then just have the unusual construction around the yoke that's great so what else if you got you've got another design behind you here we've got another design tabouli and this one is also got some kind of interesting construction going on it's one that I've actually I've developed on I could you actually find I think it's an it word designer that you'll often end up developing your designs as you go through where you start off where in this case it's going from the middle out of the back to each side I started originally with a music design called topo topo many years ago and then this was developed it further here where you have a provisional cast-on in the middle of just the shoulders and it goes out from side to side on the back and then from that point you pick up stitches down the front and down the back and if I turn her just ever so slightly you can see what that means is the top of the shoulder you've got your actual stitch pattern flow all the way down and one of the techniques that I really love working with as you know I like short rows a lot so the short rows end up getting thrown in everywhere and I've got short rows back and forth to shape the actual top of the to shape the top of the sleeve as well so it's got lots of kind of fun techniques all built into the pattern and it's all top ten Wow well again we're gonna definitely get onto short rows later and do you have a third design that you can just quickly show us this design here is Chimaera and it's a little bit similar to the tabbouleh that I was showing you here what we have it starts with a central back panel so it's just one big long strictness but then from that point what you're doing is you're picking up stitches just for the yoke and you're knitting it all the way I was here with the sleeve down and you've got the shaping actually on each side of the of the panel and then you do the same on the top so at that point you end up with just it's like a little bolero you've got the two sleeves and you've got the central panel and then you just pick up the body and you're working it down and because these stitches are live here you actually get to work that central panel so it continues down so you can kind of probably see that often something I tried to build into things where you've got a stitch pattern where even though the other pieces around it are been separately where if you put the stitches on hold you can then build the back into the rest of it so it's a little bit like putting building blocks together but trying to make it look like it flows continuously I think that's actually quite important for me in designs is making things look seamless even if they're not always seamless okay and what I noticed with that design is you've used variegated yarn and that also shows the direction of the Knitting very well and I think that's a really clever way of using the yarn with the pattern yeah because you can often then also with different very you can even do something that's more variegated and because you've got it moving in different directions it gives you a lot more ability to blend big variations in yarn so you could have a darker color for the upper section and then if you've got a totally different skin color you could actually even do it for the other one same with Ravi where I've seen when you've got the yoke done around like this I've seen wild colors but with short rows they actually end up looking fantastic which this is going to lead me onto your neck to my next question because in 2016 you self-published a book called knitting with rainbows and that book included 11 patterns where you were showcasing gradient yarns to their best advantage and I think gradient yarns are really interesting because they're similar to speckled yarns when speckled yarns first came out most people were just knitting them in plain stocking stitch which I think sort of gets a little bit limiting aesthetically after a while but then gradually designers started using them more and more creatively and that got super exciting so but I'm sure there's a lot of challenges with designing with gradient yarn so can you talk about some of those challenges but first of all just say what types of gradient yarns there are yet with gradients very often that most difficult part is trying to figure out what to do with them because frequently people will buy these gradients because in the box or in the collection they just look incredible but the problem is that what you see on the skein doesn't always translate into the finished piece and so like what started this hope process off for me was I had a really nice-looking gradient that I got it was from fiber optics and it was in this little box and it's sat there and I didn't know what to do with this and then I gathered other ones and I realized that there was huge big variations in the type of gradients and so I wanted to classify them and maybe I should be a scientist so I but I want but I wanted to classify them and put them into different into different categories so that it allowed me to figure out the best way of using them so I kind of I did that in a general way in the book and then put different stitch patterns and different design ideas for each one of those together so the first one that I looked at is this type of yarn where you can actually see it's it's a single skein of yarn and it goes from one color in this case the light color all the way to the darker one this is Freya and this is probably the easiest one to use because you can pretty much use this in any pattern biggest problem is going to be that it's just a single size so it's quite difficult to extend this because you're going to be you have to kind of intersperse it sometimes what people end up doing and I find quite good is single skein like this and taking a complementary or maybe a very big contrast color and you can intersperse it and then the gradient continue on behind us so the example I have here is Shanna keel and this is Miss in knit circus yarn and it starts with very very light purple and it runs all the way to this bright gold over in the other end and because this was quite it was quite a long is a big skin if you aren't I should say I was able to use the one skein to do the whole thing so I could pull the end of the skein in this case the actual the Goldy color and use it as the contrasting color through going through here so I'm working from the start and the end of the skein together and and another thing that I was doing with this that I found great with gradient yarns is because you've got the color change going this way if you pull in biasing effects it means that you have your color go in one way but - we're going another way so let's see if I can pull it out a little bit here so you can kind of that's exciting yeah so it means that so adding a little bit of visual interest and finding a way of extending that single skein of yarn I think is the challenge with one skein like this that's really beautiful I love the color combination can you just hold it out for me one more time the scarf so we can all see it here's the scarf kind of held out and the tip is up on my right side here and the end of it the cast off is over on this side here and that's Shanna keel it's completely stunning great okay so what else so that is the first one the next type that you're kind of looking at then you're you're looking at multiple skeins of yarn like this they're a little bit mixed up the colors so normally you have a go from one side to another going from light to dark this particular sample here you can see they're very close together so you can almost use this a bit like that single scale gradient where you can run straight from one to another and you're going to get hardly any color difference in between the whole thing but one thing that you can do with these little mini skins as well is you can have a couple of them if you manage to get two or three packs of these you can use all the small one or the next one and so that you can end up with a much bigger variant of skins then because that would be a problem with garments wouldn't it you need to have enough of the yarns that smoothly run in enough quantity to knit a proper big garment exactly and that's that's definitely the challenge of using gradients for bigger projects is that's one of the things you need to think about is how to pull it in so like the example I have got here is called mardik and so that goes you can see it goes from a yellow color over here all the way to the dark brown and that was a whole series of little mini skeins and in this case I actually just joined them together and again like the last time you can see that I've used biasing where you've got increases on one side and decreases on another so the entire at the tire thing is is a slanting as you're going through then so that means this you've got yeah you basically color go in one way and the patcher and going the other way what you've got as well is the waves and the stitch pattern and also just basically break up your actual I suppose the color so that you're not gonna just straight lines going across I was wondering if you've done any slip stitches there on the on the color changes but you haven't this one it's not slip stitches there actually it's drop stitches so it's actually I've just got a drop stitch and so you know your as in you winding the yarn around it twice and then you drop it off in the next row so you get this lovely big extended stitch pattern and while that actually I find that does is because you've got these increases and decreases going across here then this drop stitch even though it's just going straight across the increases and decreases that each side it would cause it to undulate up and down so I think often mcgrady ins what you're trying to do is you want to break it office like you buy us you want the stitch patterns you're looking for undulating stitch patterns laces with increases and decreases and things like that so it means that you just you get a lot more visual interest and it's not just rows of color changing which while it is interesting I think that there's a lot more can be done with gradients than that so the third type that I want to look at is similar to the last one because you're you've got it's again it's a series of different little skeins but this time instead of having ones that are really close together you're having big colored jumps so they're really more like complementary colors more so than gradients that can be moved into gradients so here these are just three colors where you can see they're not exactly this you know they're obviously they're moving from a light to a dark color there's a big step in between H yeah yeah but because of the of the jumps what you want to do is a way of dividing it up so the first one here that I've done is I'm gonna put these on these are probe's and these ones it's actually it was it was a set of mini skeins but it actually had but because there was big jumps between the colors what I ended up using was a slip stitch pattern to actually pull one color up to the other color and it really it really helped to kind of to basically to kind of spread the colors between the two of them so I find slip stitch patterns which is one of the sections I ended up putting in the book are fantastic for colors where you want big contrast it's not going to work for ones with very little contrast but perfect contrast it's fantastic the other way I've done it is with this shawl here which is the half Moone show and the half Moone the colors I was showing you while ago you can see here they go from the light blue all the way up to the purple and what I've done with this is I've actually I'm using a complementary color to divide so every time you're going from one color up to the next color you've got a complementary color going through and so what that means is you're creating a natural divide and it actually then allows you to very much extend the amount of colors you do to see you can add in extra of these ones and then put your contrast color and then you move on to the next one and you've got your contrast color and you end off with the final color so it's it's a really good way of extending that the colors out a little bit further [Music] hello again I've just done a big mistake so I have to backtrack a whole lot which is kind of annoying hope you enjoyed part one of the interview in part 2 carol is going to answer all the questions you have on short rows and short row methods even the questions that you didn't realize that you had because in 2015 is she published this book here which is short run it's it's it's really like a master workshop on short row methods it compares all the different ones and gives you a lot of beautiful projects to practice them on so a lot of that information she's going to be talking about in the part two of the interview and she also shows us her yarn which reminds me that she is offering fruity meeting patrons are 15 percent discount of both her yarns and her books from her online shop in on her website and carol has two types of yarns newah which is a sport weight and newer worsted which is obviously a worsted weight yarn and carol is also offering a 25% discount of her self-published patterns from her reverie store which you've seen a really stunning they're well-designed and very well written and I think this is a really great offer and carol has published some beautiful collections in book form both digital and print and her short Rose book that I've just showed you is a really great book to have in the technical part of your knitting library I've completed my miracle by algebraic aphelion who also works under the name Olga Jesse I mentioned in the last episode that the inspiration for this design is the mirror fold which was developed by the Japanese astrophysicists Kiril Nura now I found that really interesting but it was actually only after I've been knitting on this cow for a while that I recognized that the design of the cow doesn't quite match the design of the mirror fold and I'll show you why that is so here's the diagram of August design and you can see that it's essentially a whole lot of parallelogram stacked on of each other the mirror fault on the other hand has to have the parallelograms mirrored on each repeat so once you know that it's really easy to or it would be really easy to modify always designed to match a real mirror fault obviously that's not important but I still found it interesting and I looked into it and the reason the mirror fold is so brilliant is that it allows you to fold up rigid panels into a very small space and then unfold this structure in a very very well-defined way okay and Kuro Miura is an astrophysicist and the application that he found for this was for solar panels on a satellite so they've actually done this and this is my little model to show you how it works all right so if you imagine this is our solar panel and we want to we're sending it up into space on our satellite and so we want it as small as possible and you can see it folds up really small so we send it up into space and I need to grab it at the right spot and once we're into orbit we've got our satellite in orbit then you can unfold this structure in a really orderly way so you simply pull this way and this is what they do out in space and the things stretches out of grab the wrong spot there it is and it stretches out into the big solar panel structure and the thing is that the path that that takes is really well-defined doesn't quite work perfectly with paper but still now that's really so it's defined because all of these little bits are very rigid yeah because they're rigid but also because it's not just a plain criss cross square pattern okay because they are parallelograms and they have these angles there's kind of only one way it can go right so if you just had if you imagine you had something like this but instead of having this sort of zigzag pattern it was just all right angles so a whole lot of squares instead of parallelograms then the thing could essentially it could sort of hang down or it could go in different ways particularly when you was crossing it up again I work and when you squash it up here it goes in a it goes back together in a defined way or as if it was just a crisscross squares you could easily weren't actually working like it would flop out and not go together properly so but your knitting is not rigid yeah so it's not really that important it does look a bit different if you change the pattern and I actually think if you just change it the basic way it doesn't look that good you essentially end up with this zigzag which is a different pattern or maybe you'd like that but I don't know that it's any better than that designed by Olga you could also offset it a bit and then you end up with mirrored parallelograms but still having a checkerboard sort of thing so it's like I've got another diagram of that here's the other diagram of it so I'll just show you the other little model that I made that's another one it's big the angles all different on this so it doesn't do the same thing or you can't see it but still there it is it looks really cute so you could just squish it a lot yeah and they're looking at medical applications for this sort of thing where you need to make something really small but it's still got certain physical properties so it's pretty cool but I think essentially the main benefit of changing it modifying auguste patterns so that it does reflect a real mirror fold is you can then tell the story and you haven't got the risk of somebody saying hey your cowl here actually it doesn't look like the solar panels on that satellite up there and you don't want to underestimate the risk of having an astrophysicist amongst your knitting friends that's true jennipher bill is actually a weather scientist is a weather scientist so she's probably working on data from a satellite which has solar panels which look almost like this cow it's a small world yes all right so that's my cow my finished project my new project is we I said in the last episode I had the suspicion that Andrea was going to give me something a little bit more challenging and I was completely right and we're being the master and I'm the apprentice I'm going to be doing a classic cable cardigan for our daughter Madeline and we've looked long and hard at lots of different designs and we ended up deciding or we finalized on this design by Michele Wang and it's called Sal in what we thought was really cool about this is the way you've got the cables and they sort of end up being a bit of a diagonal pattern there and we like the way that sort of contrasts with the very deep v-neck on the cat on the cardigan yeah so it's a Brooklyn tweed design yep we're still waiting for my wall to come so I haven't got that yet I have got a small amount of the wall so I'm gonna be doing a swatch to check that out yeah and in the meantime and to practice your cables that's right I'm going to practice cables yeah yes and I'm also working on this sock with incredibly fine young microscopic another sock for me yes that's right so this leads on to starting a new car we've just finished our Martin story car we've still got the woolly worm head car which goes to the end of July and we've got a year long crochet along happening but we really do need a new car now in the past I've always easily come up with new ideas for a cowl but it took me a little bit longer this time I've had some really great things in the past we've had what have we had we've had modify your garment cowl where you had to do a major modification on it on a garment we've had the first the first garment cast garment people have never done sweaters before we've done the knit for your man cow so any man in your dear man in your life gets a jumper so that could be your partner or your son or your brother so that was a really fun one they really enjoyed that one we've had the you and me car where you had to knit two projects big projects one for yourself and one for a dear friend or person of your choice and the projects had to be connected so they could have been the same yarn the same pattern or the same patterning or something that connects them in a story yeah so you remember each other we've heard the lacing cables Carl so I've had a quite a few good cars but we've got a new car what I wanted is something general so a lot of people could participate but something very challenging so I've come up with the new technique car now the rules for the new technique car it has to be a large project it can be a jumper or a cutting in for an adult or a large Shaw or a large blanket and you have to take a technique that scare feee you might have done it a little bit but it's kind of on the edge of your comfort zone and you think oh I don't know I didn't succeed very well with it all it looks too hard or I'd really like to do it but never got around to doing it so something that's scary a new technique for you so for Andrew for instance he's done a little bit of cabling he did that little squiggle on my hiking school cable that was good yeah but his new cardigan is just covered with cables so he's going to get a ton of practice and the reason why it has to be a large project is we want you to get a ton of practice we want you to be doing this technique hundreds of times so that by the end of the project you actually have some familiarity some real familiarity with it you've got it in the muscle memory because if you only do it for one small section it's so new that even when you finish that small section it hasn't you haven't become accustomed to it so it's really not a point it's it's not really it's not going to benefit you you'll still find be scared about it next time you come to it so you have to pick a project it doesn't know if you for instance if you're doing cables for the first time it doesn't have to be really tricky it can be a simple cable but you're going to repeat it from the majority of the project so that's the guidelines though the majority or a large large portion of the project has to be repeating this new technique if you've never done short roads for instance don't pick a garment that just has four short rows on the shoulder shaping that's not enough pick a large sure that the whole structure of the shore is to do a short short row shaping so that you've practiced short rows a hundred times and you really feel familiar with it at the end so we want it we want you to pick a tech technique that's scary for you so it's a big challenge and and that you can really at the end say I've achieved that I've become familiar with it and it's now in my box or my talk it I think it should be called the scary count yeah well see Andrew and I always have disagreements about names because he likes short names that are exactly to the point and I like descriptive names take a few extra words so I think maybe there's scary technique cow or the new scary technique that I'm staring to me anyway so that's the guidelines now Emmy who is takbir on Ravelry has very kindly been doing most of the moderating in our car every threads which has been absolutely wonderful now it is really hard to tell somebody that your project doesn't fit the guideline so you can't be involved so I'm so make sure that you're pretty strict on yourself with the guidelines so that poor Emmy doesn't have to feel bad about telling you that your project can't be included yeah and and take it as a challenge take it as an opportunity to do that thing that you're scared about so you want to jump in the deep end with two feet it's gonna be exciting we'll all be in there together yep well I'm scared yeah really totally being scared is good yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello my name is Tatiana car I'm from Kazakhstan and I speak Russian I've been living in United States for quite some times now I've been a passionate knitter for seven years now when a friend introduced it to me I've always been fascinated by doggies and shawls because of their beauty and a complexity of their motifs it never made sense to me to need something so intricate and just to be put away in a closet that's what the idea came from that I would want to need doing this and shawls and make something wearable out of them such as stops skirts and especially dresses I have needed over 80 dresses for myself enough donated son for the nation or a charity to be sold for a higher price given that I've invested a colossal amount of hours in each project arranging from a hundred hours up to 300 hours so let me show you some of my work this dress is made out of lace weight yarn in mohair and silk blend by Cascadian yarn it was needed from waist down and waist up it is a converted doily called Freya and the design is very simple with nothing special there's nothing special about it however it the intention behind it is to rather show the beauty of the matisse themselves when I was knitting the skirt after second repetition there is a particular row that doubles the amount of stitches in order to avoid that it could be easily modified to end up with the same amount of stitches when are these I've finished knitting the skirt I simply used the crochet hook to insert the elastic and then picked up stitches I need everything from waist up the motifs of bars borrowed from the skirt wear diamonds appear and apply to the top a few words about the slips right now I'm wearing a nude color slip but I do have several colors that I can wear with the same dress that transformed the look of the dress and can be easily matched to your shoes or purse and this is how it looks now I would like to show you another interpretation of Freya doily I was planning on exposing this dress to outside harsh elements such as Sun rocks grass and sand and that's why I chose artiste a acrylic crochet thread number five and this acrylic yarn is known for stain resistant characteristics this yarn is much bulkier than my previous dress therefore it transform the look of the dress I used a less repetition in rounds which creates a more fitted look around my hips and the top is needed in all stockinette stitch all over the embellished touch here is a so on beaded color and a few words on a slip again since I'm wearing nude colors which is not very contrasting color to my skirt the motifs are closed in and therefore a dress looks much heavier however if you wanna lighten up the dress and make it more weightless you might want to consider a much contrasting slip in this dress I used to like old romantic by the non-designer because this tool it was so long but I still wanted to preserve the entire story of the dwelling I had to use double zero size needles and it still and that was a maxi dress I also used yarn that is called silk indium 20/2 it's a hundred percent silk and what's interesting about this particular garment is that I use this as a coloring book as you can see some of my motifs are highlighted with a great color the way they did that I spread my garment out on the table that was covered by foil or the plastic would work too I didn't want to put any fabric behind it because when I was coloring my garment I didn't want that fabric to soak up dye and travel in the areas that have been one thing in the garment I also used just food acid as my agent and also I used a rubbing alcohol I was applying the robbing alcohol with a spray bottle in the areas that I wanted to cover I made sure that my brush the regular brush like a watercolor brush i when i was colouring i made sure that i didn't touch anything that is close to the edge for example here so it wouldn't so that that wouldn't travel however the good news that we are overs around the motifs naturally naturally did I travel too far so and this is there is the final results of this gathering in this example I used a link called a hemlock which means a corn in German language by Herbert nibblin the yard was used as 100% merino wool in lace weight by jaga Swan I would like to talk about three features on this dress first one that you can see the skirts it's higher than the natural waist about five inches that's just give you another idea what to do when you're dealing with longer doulas in order to achieve shorter skirt length and if some of my dresses actually sits up to my arm suits and later I was just decided I'm gonna wear a belt and the second feature on this dress is instead of using what see borrowed from the skirt I used a texture from the acorn and applied it all over the top and the third feature is a ruffle that goes all around my collar so instead of isolating a specific motif rather I needed the entire section of the skirt and applied it here and what's interesting about this color that I've inserted the elastic which allows me to rearrange my color in a different way depending on the move and for example like this so let me show you how it looks all around [Music] if you inspired and you want to make your very own doily dress consider the size of the doily if it's too long even for maxi dress then you might want to sacrifice some of the motifs and start meeting other later rose on the doily or you can stop meeting early and come up with your own edging if none of those options are feasible for your project then consider smaller needles and a lighter sized yarn which will create a tighter and a smaller fabric finally if you are one of those people who have numerous amount of doilies sitting in your closet and you want to show it off to your friends you just might have a ready-made dress sitting on your hands what you need to do is to cut out the center piece by securing all the stitches first either through the Lifeline or using sewing machine thus a doughnut shaped oily now becomes an instant skirt or ready-made dress like a basis for your dress I hope you found this useful and happy kneading [Music] [Music] isn't Tatiana amazing her knitting is just so gorgeous I totally love like discovering or seeing new knitters who are thinking outside of the box and doing something different and unusual within knitting and she fits in that category absolutely yeah just beautiful beautiful dresses so well done Tatiana and thank you so much for your contribution that's great it actually that's the perfect wedding dress isn't it you could just make the most stunning wedding dress Madeline's got to get married there's not a guy on the horizon yet so that's a long way off it reminds me of the interview that we did in episode 64 with the two Shetland sisters and yunsun and Kathleen Anderson they knit absolutely stunning gorgeous intricate Shetland lace sort of heirloom shawls and the it's just beautiful their work and ever since interviewing them I thought I would really love to plan out an heirloom sure with different Shetland lace patterns and knit it but what's kind of held me back is the fact that I just wouldn't wear it and I really love wearing my knitting I would actually get more wear out of a lace dress and actually I should just email them quickly and and get them to watch Jackie Anna because they would love that yeah they would find what she's doing really great yeah so I had to do that but um yeah so a dress is is closer but I still don't think I'd get that much wear out of it which is the shame when I used to perform I would definitely get wear out of it because you know that was always a great excuse for buying gorgeous clothes because yeah yeah I had to really dress up then but now I just work from home and we don't go out much yeah nobody ever sees you I can't sit at home editing in a beautiful lace dress no you can sit here yeah but then you'd only see me waist up you wouldn't see it there's so much knitting in that skirt did you see it it's just just stunning anyway so Madeleine has to get dressed up or you know liver a glamorous lifestyle which also doesn't look like it's going to happen she gets dressed up less than me or she has to get married yeah something will happen yeah the only thing is maybe you should start now anyway because there's probably a bit of work in one of those either a shawl or a dress there's a bit of knitting in there I don't think you should be going doing anything for a couple of years - yeah so we're now up to the part where we ask you to support the show and become a patron just to remind you this is my full-time job and at the end of July it's also going to be Andrews full-time job yeah so for the last three years I've been working on this full-time seven days a week for the last three years and Andrews been working every evening and weekend on top of a full demanding full-time demanding job so as you can imagine we couldn't keep this up longer than three years it was way too stressful and we're heading for a breakdown so we actually had to make a really hard decision do we stop the show or does Andrew leave the security of his job and we go to both working full-time and have a couple of evening evenings off during the week and even one day off during the week and therefore make it more sustainable to go into the future well we made that decision it was a very tough decision it was a hard for us but just to remind you we we put all of our energy into making a high-quality production so we're not earning an income from anything that's related on the side and we don't sell anything else and we're not receiving advertising or sponsorship money the show is only possible through patron support you can become a patron for a small amount each month and your contribution does really make a difference so if you are watching please do become a patron and for all of the wonderful viewers who have taken action to support the show and make it possible a huge thank you because it really is your show it wouldn't exist without you so thank you yeah coming up now is a very short and sweet extreme knitting segment we took this footage when we were in Wales over Chris and it's a place called fairy Glen it's beautiful little Gorge and we've actually got some really beautiful a Bach Prelude it's Prelude number nine in a-flat minor so enjoy that straight after that we've got part two of our interview with Carole fella where you can have learned all sorts of amazing things about short row is also very valuable so thanks very much for being with us today it's been fun for us hope it's been good for you we'll see you in two weeks time bye bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so in 2017 you brought out your own yarn range which you've caught newer so just tell us briefly what motivated you to do that also tell us what the name means and and more importantly or to me tell us what key and characteristics that you were really excited about including in the yarn when you were designing it yeah and in 2016 I believe verse 17 I keep getting losing track of of years because time moves on far too quickly I brought out the first yarn which was newer such as this one here which is a sports weight yarn and then this year I brought up newer worsted which is a worsted weight yarn so I was really excited about actually putting a yarn together myself for a couple of reasons the first one is that because I primarily designed garments I wanted a yarn that worked really well with garments and of course as a designer normally you get you you can get color ranges from from yarn companies and you can goes like oh I'd like that color if it could be just slightly at this end of the range but it meant that I had complete control over the colors that I got to put together so there is something really kind of a little bit exciting about being able to do that because it's it's not often you have that degree of control so the way it ended up putting together is all of us really play to our strengths because I knew what I wanted to design with I because I want to design with garments are primarily garments I wanted one that was non superwash because with superwash because of the actual course in honors for garments it gets a little bit heavy and so it doesn't always hold its shape so that was why this super non super wash was important to me then the actual blend of fibers it was sixty percent merino 20 percent yak and 20 percent linen and that idea actually came from Andy who was the person who organizes the milling because he knows his fibers and they all play really nicely together because the merino the advantage of the merino is that it is it's just a good way Coris yarn it's soft and it's fairly cost-effective yak has got two benefits one it's pretty much a softest cashmere but in addition to that it's got this very light beige color naturally and what that does is it totally changes the actual way everything dies because when you're over dying on a beige yarn it means everything has got a slightly rustic muted tone and then the last one is linen linen was it's kind of a nod to the fact that there was a very strong Milind linen tradition in Ireland historically up in Belfast and it has the added benefit in the yarn it's got a totally different fiber so when when it's dyed instead of going the darker colors it stays and light Tweedy effect so you can particularly see it in the darker colors that deeper depth of color and Tweedy effect comes from the linen and the fact that it does not die the same way as the other colours so that's kind of how all of those fit together one of the kind of interesting things for us was I don't like naming things but my husband loves naming stuff so most of the names came courtesy of him and in that he went ahead and he did I tell him what I was thinking about him like this reminds me of I don't know a cache or something else and then he would keep throwing names at me until once stuck and I said oh that's the one we want that sounds good so again it's kind of played to strengths he likes naming stuff and I know when I when he hits on a name that I really like the sound of so this is new an Irish word newest actually is an Irish word it's a it means new in Irish so I often feel a little bit silly when I'm saying he's my new yarn new it's a little redundant especially down in Cork because it's a heavy Irish speaking area of Ireland isn't it part of it yeah and the West yeah okay so I'd really like to get back onto short rows which you mentioned earlier you've got a really comprehensive book cord sure it's and you in the book you described four different methods of short rows and there's plenty of patterns in here for the measure to get lots of experience and practice in doing short rows in different areas of knitting for example bust darts or set in sleeves or dipping hems and neck shaping now personally I just really love the German short row and I'm never really happy with the the rap and tone method I always find it looks just a little bit sloppy and I often wonder why we can't just ditch that method all together and just simply have German short rows or on occasion if we want a really sort of invisible finish perhaps a Japanese short row so can you just give us a description of which short row methods work best in different areas of knitting so short rows very often when you're looking at short rows people don't realize what what they are because they think that they're much more complicated than they are in reality so with short rows all you're doing is you're going short er than the end of the row then you're turning and you're working back to go in the other direction so it's how you actually join that gap is what makes the difference and you want a method of turning so that you hide that gap the reason there are so many methods out there is because different techniques work better for different for different types of situations so the one that most people have encountered is going to be the wrap and turn method and very often it's ended up used as shorthand in in most in most patterns they just put in wrap and turn the technique that I have actually done with with wrap and turn is I've makes sure that the actual wrap sits behind the stitch because that's often what messes up short rows are because if the stitch doesn't stay straight you're going to be very it's going to be very obvious where you turn and it works well in stitch patterns where you've got a fairly good gauge it's not too loose and it's not too tight and in situations where you might have a short rows because it's easy to spot her it is because you can see the rap so the first example I have of rap and turn is Salta which is this pattern here and it's used both across the top of the shoulders where you've got the shoulder slope and so I've used short rows to actually to slope instead of doing stair steps and also across the actual the opening on top of the sleeve cap again because I find short rows one of the best ways of actually putting in a sleeve cap because you've got the opening and you just pick up all the stitches and then you start with about the top third and you add one extra stitch each time and wrap and turn for that particular one is extremely advantageous because you can leave the actual wrap there and it forms an actual seam line down the side of the sleeve so it means that wrap and turn is the fastest to do and it actually enhances the sleeve cap I might have to rethink my ideas unrepentant so the next short row technique that I want to look at is the Japanese short robe which is really almost like an extension of the wrap and turn but instead of actually wrapping that yarn around the stitch you're putting an on a stitch marker or a piece of yarn or a safety pin and the benefit of this is because you're putting it on something off and I'm trying to wrap around stitch it's much smaller and then because it's much smaller you can use it in situations that the wrap and turn will be too visible so I would use it on if you've got very loose gauge like a lace weight it's great for that because it's if you know the the fabric can be quite see-through in the one behind me here which is Esther Ella I've used it for the boss shaping because again it's going to be really obvious and in this case it's a slightly chunky yarn so even a small bit of extra yarn is going to be really obvious so yeah for the for the short row method in a Japanese short rows I find that really really handy for places where you want invisible so that's an - the third one would be German short rows which is your favorite I believe correct and that was one that I actually picked up by accident through the Raveena salon because I would I hadn't come across it and the there was a particular lady who said why don't you use German short rows and I hadn't come across them before and so when I looked into him life there a great short row method particularly for garter stitch because with that you're turning the work and then you lift the next stitch over and so you're pulling the row from below up is how you're actually joining it together so in this particular one here this is cherry poo and it goes from side to side the ball and you've got short rows here and here and so what the short rows are actually doing in this particular case is they're shaping the entire ball and you're creating a three-dimensional effect with short rows and if you turn to the side here the actual the short rows are almost invisible because the the with garter stitch it's going to be in particularly in cases where it's visible from both sides it can be it's it's very easy to to hide the short rows with the German method is there any place that you wouldn't use German short rows German short rows I find when you've got something that's got a very loose stitch pattern it's not ideal because you're you're trying to rely on pulling the row below up in order to actually hide where it's turned so if the stitch pattern is loose like in a shawl or something like that then you're going to run into the problem of it's going to be visible and we'll leave a hole so that's the one time that I find that it's it's not ideal and so yeah generally I find that if something is not working very well for you in a particular situation and if you've got a range of short row types in your arsenal swap another one out and try it you know it's really a good thing to try that's definitely true and that's the interesting point that you made because it makes me realize why I like German short rows so much because I tend to like a firm ish fabric you know and so I haven't had a problem with it so far but it's interesting to hear you say that it doesn't work so well in a loose gauge and the other method I thought I've actually added in the book is called the yarn over short row method and it's one that it doesn't get used all that often and the times that I find it the most useful is for socks and the reason it's so good and socks is because your yarn over is sitting on the needle so effectively it's like your wrap is sitting up on the needle and with sock heel your start with the width of the heel and you're working short rows in and then you're working short rows back out again so you've got a short row sitting on top of a short row so if all of them are actually on the needle it's really easy to just work the two of them together so it's about the only time I really use the yarn over method but it's extremely helpful okay now just to finish this topic do you have any special tips that you can either give to beginners who are really struggling or even some advanced things for people who didn't you know do short rows all the time but but could learn something else as well for new initials I would definitely suggest learning several different methods and so that way you know which ones that you like best and you know which situations you like them in and I suppose an extension of that is then for more advanced knitters is don't be afraid to swap short rows out so if you've got a pattern the calls for wrap and turn but you know that you don't really like that just swap it out for a method that you do like that you know will work better in that particular situation and I suppose tied with that as well is when you do swap them out be aware of how it will alter the pattern and so if it says to work before you know three stitches before the previously wrapped stitch just be aware how changing the method might change the location of that as well that's super important that's something you really need to know for sure let's change the topic completely and go to photography which is really important for any independent designer now your husband is your photographer so can you can you say something about your approach to photography and photo shoots that maybe is a bit helpful for other independent designers or makers my husband does all the photography as he said Joseph he does the photography for me and so he's kind of been learning along with me really because it started you know it's it's a hobby for him and he really enjoys doing the photographs I find that well obviously you need to start with some good equipment that's always a good place to start and most designers if you're doing it with another job or in the evenings and things like that having it with your partner can be extremely helpful because it means you can take advantage of very short spaces of time that you might have or if the weather changes exactly or if the weather changes and you suddenly realize that you have perfect cloud cover you can go and and take a very quick photo shoot so it's got huge advantages to be able to take - yeah take advantage basically of good situations the like we sometimes do work with other models but it tends to be for books so that we've got several samples all done at the same time and then it's worth your while because if you've just got one piece all right you're not really going to hire another and a model to do it so which is why I end up doing a lot of male modeling is just because it's fast and it's quick and it fits in with our life and for so many small businesses we're partners or couples or friends who live close together or working together a totally reliant on being able to quickly work together in in unusual timeframes could be the weekend could be the a.k that the evenings because that's all you've got really and you have to fit this always so much to do and so you have to fit in what you can in those little time slots so I can totally relate to that let's talk now about your niche alongs knit along seemed to be really important to you because you're quite well you're very active on the forums there and which is a good thing because it means that you immediately get feedback on your patterns so how is this direct contact with knitters influenced or impacted your pattern writing and designing yeah Vanessa Long's all ended up kind of coming about by accident for me really because the first one because I like designing garments I said I don't if I do initially like I wanted to be a garment design but of course for garments what ends up causing problems for people is modifications is that we don't all come in the same size and as a designer I've got to use just your standard sizing as a starting point because you have to you have to put something in the pattern so in order for it to fit all the knitters what became important to me was making sure people knew how to modify patterns and where to modify them and that's really where the michelin's came in so I release each section of the pattern as a series of clues with a page of tips and kind of explaining how you would change things where you would change it and because the pattern is like the clue is just a section of the pattern and it means that more advanced or experienced knitters instead of taking the pattern and running and finishing through their waiting around and they're chatting with other knitters and they're giving them advice and so while obviously there's my input it's way more than me it ends up becoming community and all of the other knitters actually support the newer the newer knitters and the newer garment knitters so you end up with a very inclusive teaching experience for everyone that's a really smart way of organizing it and it means that my patterns end up including a lot more of those modifications and things that are going to trip people up as they're knitting so that it means that I know where people are going to have problems okay we're going to finish off the interview now and when we'll do that with a concluding question and that's you've been in the industry now for twelve years which is quite a long time and it's very a successful thing to do is to keep your business full-time throughout that long time span and you've done that in a few different ways you've you've brought out your yarn you been publishing books you've been teaching regularly in workshops and and retreats everywhere so when you look back on all the things that you've done over those years what do you think your most content with and also is there any area in your knitting or your designing or your business that you feel really compelled to explore further that you haven't quite done yet I think what I'm probably most content with is the fact that it's been completely unpredictable is that while I started off accidentally designing and putting PDFs together everything led on to another thing organically so what I've kind of come to discover is that you can't really predict what you're going to be doing in six weeks six months or whatever time so that I mean I'm actually kind of leads on to what I hope for the future as well is I hope it continues to be as unpredictable as it has been up to this point and then I've got enough flexibility that I can actually keep changing and exploring new things and being able to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves yeah that is so important to still keep a strong interest after 12 years isn't it you do need that flexibility and that natural organic change into developing different areas so that's a really good answer yeah well it's been fantastic to have you on fruity knitting thanks so much for spending your time and sharing your experience and your knowledge with us we really appreciate it it's been a pleasure whose lovely talking with you good okay let's say goodbye to the audience bye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Fruity Knitting

Views: 71,574

Keywords: Knitting, Carol Feller

Id: Yo6aqxNzTYI

Length: 88min 38sec (5318 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019