Hello, maker friends! I recently wrote a pattern. Well, that’s not exactly true. I recently finished writing a pattern. It’s a really cool pattern, though, and I have had a serious amount of fun working on it and I really want to show it off to everyone – AND their dog – because that’s how amazing I think it is. I love all of my patterns, but some are just extra special.
So, let me tell you how this pattern came to be.
It all started at a church dinner. It was a Thanksgiving dinner, actually. Three years ago. Yep, you read that right. I like to think about things for a long time.
So, our pastor and his wife, Patty, had recently returned from a vacation to Italy. Patty was wearing a lovely ruffled shawl that she bought on their trip and I was entranced by it. It was diaphanous. I kept looking at her shawl. It had beautiful drape. Talking with people and enjoying dinner, I kept thinking about her shawl. Fellow clothing makers, can you relate? I finally got a chance to talk with her and, of course, complimented her shawl and then asked her if I could take some photos of it. She laughed and posed for a few cell phone photos for me for which I thanked her profusely and we proceeded to have a lovely evening.
After the dinner, I kept the image of that shawl of hers in my mind – and the photos on my phone – while I thought about how to achieve the effect of that shawl in a knitted version. What fiber would it need? What yarn weight? What color? I didn’t want to just replicate the design, but use it as inspiration for a new design using the elements of the original that I loved. I let all of these things marinate in my mind while I worked on and published other designs.
Skipping forward to last year, I was looking for something to watch while knitting at night. I do 90% of my knitting after my kids are in bed watching knitting podcasts on YouTube or old Star Trek episodes with one earbud in my ear and the other open so I can hear if the kids need something *or if something’s messing with our chickens and ducks outside.
I had just discovered the Amazon Prime Video trap, which includes old episodes of Dr. Who. It had been a while since I had done a watch-through, so I decided to revisit the series. Season one, episode one. I was enjoying myself, getting my knitting done, and appreciating the series all over again.
I eventually came to episode 9 of season one: The Empty Child. If you’re a fan of the Doctor, you probably know which one I’m talking about (Are you my Mummy?). You may not remember the opening, though. Or maybe you do. You might be more observant than I am, with a better memory for such things.
You can go find it on Amazon Prime Video, if you like, to refresh your memory. It’s ok, I’ll wait.
The Doctor says that mauve is the universally recognized color for danger.
He’s also tracking something through time and space that he refers to as “mauve and dangerous and about 30 seconds from the **centre of London.”
So, as I was re-watching this episode, I thought, “Someone must have dyed a yarn colorway called Mauve and Dangerous.” I mean, with all the Dr. Who fans out there, how could it not have already happened? I posted something on Instagram asking if any of my indie yarn dyer friends had done it because I just had to see it.
I got one response.
One person responded to my plea. Kayla of www.wipsonsticks.com told me she hadn’t thought of doing it but she was willing to give it a shot. Oh, how my little mental wheels started turning then! I went back to that shawl that I had been obsessing over for the past two years and I knew that it was finally time to make it real. I grabbed some yarn and started swatching.
To be continued…
If you would like to see the pattern details, you can find it in my Ravelry store HERE. By the way, Kayla has yarn kits available for it, too. You can find it at www.wipsonsticks.com.
*Living in the country, we do have to worry about predators attacking our flock. We lost 4 of our ducks this year to some sort of predator attacking at night, possibly a weasel. We put a stop to it by adding another line of electric fence wire around the bottom of our duck enclosure.
**British spelling intentional, considering the context of the quote.