Earlier this week, I told you about the motif designing exercise I needed to do as part of the Kate Davies Knitting Season thing. It took pretending I had an actual deadline and stressing myself out about it, but I finally got the assignment done! I wound up doing two motifs because I couldn’t narrow it down to just one.

The first one I did was most like the Knitting Season motif itself, which I would describe as a stylized, elaborate snowflake. My first barrier here was the math of figuring out how big to make the thing and how to set up the stitch grid and so on. Once I got that hammered out, the next barrier is that I am terrible at drawing. TERRIBLE. So here is my solution for that one.

I traced a leaf shape that I printed out from the internet after making the image the size I needed it to be. Then I went over the tracing and kind of “digitized” it by interpreting the tracing into stitch squares. I tried to introduce a little randomness into each tracing so the outlines wouldn’t be all alike. I suspect this is kind of cheating, but otherwise this never would have gotten done. Here is the final design with the hex sign it is based on.

You could do this either as full color intarsia (color knitting) or just one color for the pattern and one for the background. Or possibly the design could be done in texture stitches.

The other one I did because it reminded me of the kind of sweaters I used to knit in the 80’s with big extravagant intarsia designs and then little repeating motif around them. I knit a lot of those sweaters, and I kind of wish I still had them. I still have the books, so who knows? Anyway, this one I would definitely do as intarsia, though I would likely change the colors up a bit. I would use the flowers and possibly the heart and foliage as design elements on the rest of the sweater around the bird. (It is a distelfink, for those of you interested in Pa German folk art bird names.)

So all in all, I’m happy with the results and glad I forced myself to do this assignment!