The course was run by Brandon Mably, of Kaffe Fasset Design Studio fame and was on a colourwork technique known as 'magic ball'. As participants we had been asked to come with our knitting needles and a selection of yarn - 6 light colours and 6 dark colours - which we pooled in the middle of the class.
This proved a challenge for me before we had even cast on a stitch as it really made me think of how I perceived colour. We were told to cut arm's lengths of 6 light colours, tying the lengths together and then rolling them into a ball - the exercise was then repeated with the dark colours. This made me realise that Brandon Mably's perception of colour is a bit different to mine - very often he classed very bright, even fluorescent colours as 'light' ones where I would have just thought of creams, beiges and pastel colours. He encouraged me when I was working on my swatch to include some pretty, in my opinion, crazy colours into my work. Oddly enough it actually worked as I shall reveal later!
We all worked on the same pattern, casting on 34 stitches before following a charted design of 'Persian Poppies'. The idea was to use our dark ball of yarn for the background and the light ball of wool for the flowers using the fairisle technique. Primarily the workshop was to challenge our creativity and knowledge of colour rather then teaching techniques, although Brandon did show us a rather nifty way of weaving in loose ends at the back of the work and carrying our floats between colour changes.
We were encouraged to keep knitting and under no circumstances rip out our work. I am convinced this was aimed at myself - Brandon did find me undoing a few stitches (read couple of rows) at one point but this was purely because I had dropped my pattern on the floor and got a bit lost. I never once started again because I didn't like my work.
My swatch started out rather 'tasteful' in the words of the man himself and I was encouraged to be a bit more vibrant. He suggested some lurid green and yellow and despite my reservations I boldly went into a voyage of colour exploration! Here is my completed swatch:
Don't look to closely at my technique :-) but what you can see is how I improved during the course of the day. Brandon encouraged us all to look at our work from a distance as it gave us a much better perspective of what it looked like and at the end of the workshop he put all our swatches on a board for us to view:
As you can see the work looks quite different from a distance and every swatch was beautiful and sort of 'went together'. Mine is the in the first row on the left, third swatch down. I was a bit concerned that my top two poppies looked like breasts rather than flowers but the man himself referred to my swatch as a gem. And praise from a word renowned designer I am more than happy to take! It was a great day and I am determined to try this technique and pattern again in a project.
