Of gentle starts and Oddventures

Hello!

I didn’t mean to disappear for quite so long. How are you? How is your corner of the world? Here it’s a bit cold and grey but the days are getting lighter and longer (woohoo!) and we’ve had some beautiful sunsets with that distinctive lovely low bright winter sun. Also, I’ve been making many rubber stamps.

My year is unfurling slowly and with maximum kindness as I figure out the way forward for KNITSONIK. I have to share that last year I was more upset about my hands and the problems with my right wrist than I realised.

What I’ve been grieving is that I cannot knit stranded colourwork in the way I once did; that I cannot participate in the beautiful process for translating everyday life into stranded colourwork that I so happily shared in my KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook.

My way of celebrating the world in stranded colourwork grew out of a glorious creative process of seeing something I loved and wanted to celebrate in colourwork; rushing home to put together an inspiring palette of yarns in a basket; swatching in a delightful state of hyperfocus with notebook, pencil and tiny swatch project on hand; and letting each section of the swatch inspire the next. I adored getting lost in this process every time – I loved it more than I can say. My swatches are a record of attention, focus, presence, and hours of happy knitting discoveries and creative play. The feedback I consistently receive on my classes – and on my book – is that my sheer delight in this process is both infectious and inspiring.

And I can no longer do the thing that was at the heart of it: swatch in my happy Felix way.

This process is just not the same when I’m breaking every twenty five minutes to do fifteen minutes of hand stretches and needing to use ice-packs, painkillers and compression gloves for every little stint of knitting. Each sore stitch comes with the deeply worrying thought that I’m further damaging my wrist and shortening its limited working lifespan. And it frustrates me to the point of tears to have to keep stopping and starting.

I discovered all this when I designed the Oddventure hat for Shetland Wool Week 2023. Breaking every twenty five minutes, sleeping with a wrist brace, and downing endless paracetamol only dulled the pain and though I adore the design I produced, the knitting of it was bound up with horrible associations of frustration, hurty wrists, and feelings of limitation.

For all these reasons I’ve not been able to face finishing the layout for my Oddventure hat – much less put the pattern out there, or talk about the knitterly experience of making it. That is, I’ve not felt like doing any of this until now.

Last week when I was supposed to be doing something else, I was suddenly filled with the NEEEEEEEEED to finish laying out this pattern and get it out into the world. Instead of being reminded of pain and loss, I opened up the files and just saw the JOY of this hat that was knit and designed in the build up to Wool Week 2023, and in collaboration with my dear friend Jeanette Sloan.

I’d moved house about six weeks before Wool Week; Jeanette was due to move the week after we got back from Wool Week. Somehow, in between the chaos of our moves, we managed to get together to share our ideas and plan a day-long workshop and two individual hat patterns to launch at Wool Week. We’d wanted to work together again since collaborating for Knit Stars Season 6 and discovering our mutual love of playing with colour and swatching.

For our day-long class at Wool Week, we developed a motif that would work in either stranded or beaded colourwork.

In the morning, everyone worked the motif in stranded colourwork using oddments of yarn in a session led by me. In the afternoon, everyone worked the same motif in beaded colourwork, using odd beads in a session led by Jeanette. We wanted our two classes to give folks a way to make the most of odd mixes of beads or oddments of yarn left lying around in stash. Our class presented ways to bring leftover or spare stash together in a coherent design. Oddventure is the hat I made to use up yarn oddments in stranded colourwork and the Boddment Beanie is Jeanette’s hat pattern that uses up odd beads to do the same (subscribe to Jeanette’s newsletter for news of when you can knit her wonderful Boddment Beanie!)

It is called Oddventure, because it’s an Adventure with Oddments and I can never resist a portmanteau.

Having felt not quite able to talk about this design, I now feel the need to sing its praises rapturously.

For this is a design that will give a new lease of life to random little bits of fingering-weight yarn languishing in your stash…

…a design that will teach you the Magic Ball technique, and show you how to turn your oddments into glowing gradients and a mesmeric, kaleidoscopic hat-crown…

…a design in which you may find yourself prancing happily on the beach, in a dress you’ve dyed to match the palette of your oddments…

…a design in which you will strike unnatural poses, attempting to show off the aforementioned kaleidoscopic crown and the glowy gradient that seeps through the easily-memorised colourwork motif.

I wore this hat throughout filming and teaching my Colour at Play course last year, so if you’ve taken that course and wondered what that was on my head… now you know!

So why now?

Over years of having arthritis and experiencing various losses, I’ve learnt that when you give space to grief, let it have its time and act with kindness to the hurt and broken parts, the sadness does eventually pass.

And then – only then – does it start to feel possible to find solutions.

After a sweet and gentle winter in which I’ve done very little knitting, I’m now making my way slowly out of a tunnel of sadness into a land of new possibilities and a new mood of optimism – which has included finishing the layout of the Oddventure pattern and getting it uploaded into my Ravelry store and my online shop.

I’m thinking a lot about how to continue designing stranded colourwork without doing so much hand knitting. Machine knitting is one option… and I’m exploring possibilities for some kind of programme for test-knitters that would involve my supplying yarns and designs to knitters with healthy wrists, in exchange for access to various things in my online school. It’s all stuff that will take time to figure out, but I will get there in the end. In the meantime – as you’ll know if you are a newsletter subscriber – my immediate plans for 2025 are focused around building a subscription-based KNITSONIK Bullet Journaling membership. Through this we can journal together, explore new spreads and creative journaling ideas, and connect more regularly via Zoom and in my Teachable school. The membership will launch around the Spring Equinox, as this feels like a much more natural point in the year to begin things than January 1st!

I’ll say more about my gentle healing winter soon but in the meantime, if you didn’t catch it, I wrote a bit about it here for Modern Daily Knitting.

In the meantime, if your wrists are good, and you’re looking for your next adventure with colour, my knitting pattern – Oddventure – is a swift and rhythmic knit that presents ample opportunity to play with colour and repurpose all your oddments into shimmering joy.

It’s nice to be back.
In love and colours,
Felix x