The two-colour Italian Cast-On Method (A Video Tutorial)

September’s Boost Your Knitting project is chockablock with new techniques to try (fitting given that, for many of, September is synonymous with back to school!) Today, Jen shows us how to work the Italian two-colour cast on which Carol Feller uses to start the Flying Leaves Scarf.

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Banishing Brioche Blues with the Flying Leaves Scarf

The first leaves are starting to turn, there’s a crispness in the air, the kids are heading back to school … all signs point to autumn’s arrival! With the start of a new season, it’s also time to embark on our September Boost Your Knitting project …. the aptly named Flying Leaves Scarf! This beautiful, reversible scarf designed by Carol Feller will not only keep you cosy as temperatures drop, it’ll teach us the finer points of working two-colour brioche!

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More Patterns for Experimenting with Colour

The Skystone Armwarmers, designed by Felicity (Felix) Ford as August’s featured Boost Your Knitting pattern, are the perfect canvas for practicing this month’s technique, choosing colours for stranded colourwork. The pattern calls for three background and five foreground shades of Jamieson & Smith 2ply Jumperweight, giving you lots of room to capture the subtleties of your inspiration source — be it a bouquet of flowers, a mossy headstone, or a towering mountain! But if you’re casting around for more patterns to bring your newfound confidence in choosing colours too, here are a few ideas!

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An Abundance of Inspiration ... August's Boost Your Knitting KAL, so far!

This month, we’ve been having a ball over in the Ravelry group with August’s Boost Your Knitting technique, choosing colours for stranded colourwork knitting! Several knitters have already finishing their Skystone Armwarmers, this month’s featured pattern by Felicity (Felix) Ford, and many more have stunning ones in progress! It’s been so fun to see people’s inspiration sources and the ways they interpret them …

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Five Reasons I Love my Strickplaner

The Strickplaner 2020 is now on sale! I’m thrilled that we are stocking this wonderful paper planner for the third year running. This clever planner, developed by Martina Behm in collaboration with WeekView, a small German planner company, is designed to help you stay focussed on what you actually want to be getting done in any given week, month, quarter, or even year with lots of added sections that are specifically for knitters and other fibre crafters (think places to record project notes, chart patterns, and note yarn purchases)! I wrote about how much I love my planner last year, and that hasn’t changed much! Here are just five of the many reasons that I am a hardcore Strickplaner fan!

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Finding joy in the everyday : An Interview with Felicity (Felix) Ford

Last week, I was lucky enough to catch up with Felicity (Felix) Ford ahead of the release of the Skystone Armwarmers, this month’s Boost Your Knitting pattern! Felix is a knitter and sound artist who translates the joy and beauty of the everyday into amazing stranded colourwork knitting. Her books, the Knitsonik Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook and the Knitsonik Stranded Colourwork Playbook, empower knitters to unlock their own creativity by observing the world around her. We’re so lucky to have her beautiful design and expertise for this month’s knitalong — and I think you’ll agree Felix’s enthusiasm for colourwork really come through in our chat! I hope you enjoy it!

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How to choose colours for stranded colourwork (a video tutorial)

I don’t know about you, but I look forward to the release of the Boost Your Knitting video tutorials each month. Watching Jen’s kind and calm explanations is the next best thing to having your really talented knitting friend come over and help you work out a tricky bit of your pattern. And in this month’s video tutorial, we get double the fun: two knitting mates to help us build confidence in translating everyday sights and objects into beautiful stranded colourwork motifs.

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Choosing Colours for Stranded Colourwork + the Skystone Armwarmers

Ready for something a little different? August’s Boost Your Knitting technique is here, and I couldn’t be more excited about it! This month, we’ll be developing our skills in choosing colours for stranded colourwork with help from absolute colourwork whiz Felicity (Felix) Ford and knitting her stunning design, the Skystone Armwarmers!

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Running circles around intarsia

This month, we’ve been tackling intarsia in the round … and the results have been pretty spectacular! It’s always great to see the amount of learning that happens in the monthly knitalongs, but this month in particular, it’s been really inspiring to see knitters take on a technique that was new to virtually almost everyone!

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Technique Talk with Julia Farwell-Clay

his month’s Boost Your Knitting designer is the supremely talented Julia Farwell-Clay, whose cleverly cute Heartgyle Socks have knitters around the world not only working intarsia, but doing it in the round! She loves a good sweater, but also has designed beautiful accessories — she’s partial to eye-catching designs and interesting techniques! She was kind enough to sit down and answer some questions about her design process and the role that new techniques play in it — and she’s got some good advice for us too!

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