I’ve been really enjoying getting our things into THE NEW KITCHEN! The whole project deserves its own post but for now let me just show you THE RAINBOW SHELF of cookbooks!
Work has also been all about playing with colour, as the KNITSONIK & Friends Colour to Knit eBook and Club launched this week in the KNITSONIK shop! I’m really excited about this project and wanted to share a bit of background.
I stock several colouring books in the KNITSONIK online shop including my own KNITSONIK Playbook Colouring Companion, and have been exploring colouring-in as an aid to stranded colourwork design for several years.
Back in January 2020, wanting to dig deeper into this creative context with other knitters, I put out an open call on Ravelry, inviting folks to use colouring-in to inspire/assist in the creation of stranded colourwork designs. I promised to fund and support the realisation of the most resolved design ideas, and to publish them together as a capsule collection with specially-designed colouring-in sheets and tutorials. Then COVID-19 hit and everything became uncertain.
All my teaching work was cancelled and I had to turn my attention to online teaching in order to keep KNITSONIK going. Yet through these changes and uncertainty, a small and dedicated crew of makers – Beverley Dott (Fair City Knits), Patricia Kimmitt (JudithJayne Design) and Nolwenn Pensivy – kept working away on their ideas. When I saw what they’d created, I knew that whatever was going on in the world, I wanted to honour the original vision for an eBook on colouring-to-knit, using each of our projects as a case study and a jumping-off point for creative ideas.
Through 2021, we met online each month. We cheered for each others’ projects, helped one another solve problems, shared our creations and puzzled out how best to share our colouring-in and creativity with the world. The KNITSONIK & Friends Colour to Knit eBook is the fruit of this labour. It contains four stranded colourwork projects, each of which approaches colour and creativity through the lens of its designer. Supplementary essays and tutorials illustrated with gorgeous photography make the eBook inspiring and visually rich, while printable worksheets and colouring-in pages enable you – the knitter – to put our ideas to work in service of your own creative projects.
This project is disabled-led and has benefited enormously from a necessarily slow production pace. In line with this, we are releasing the chapters slowly through the summer rather than all in one go. Too, because online meetings, playing, and lots of time to work on things were crucial to our own work on this project, we wanted to share those things with you. We’re therefore offering the first wave of supporters for this project invitations to several well-spaced informal creative sessions run on Zoom, plus access to a dedicated Slack group. The KNITSONIK & Friends Colour to Knit eBook + Club Membership is a way of sharing our work with you in the same spirit in which it was created.
Go here to read the fine print about the project and how to join our club!
Until Soon,
YOURS IN PLAYING WITH COLOUR X