Sorry for the couple day absence – like much of the US we have been swept up in Marie Kondoing our house. It is much more physically and emotionally exhausting than the show makes it look 🙂 We are taking it pretty slowly, but making some progress. Undoubtedly this is going to take a while.

Anyway! Knitting! I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked this week, but what I did have I spent working on my Kate Davies Knitting Season exercises. This week was about the value of repetition in practicing your passions, both for developing a skill and also to see what happens when you alter things in your repetition. One possible example was to take a picture of the same thing or write an essay on the same topic every day for 7 days. And of course there was a knitting exercise. For this one, it was to knit the same 4-row pattern for 7 days and use it to try different things. I did two versions of this exercise.

For the first one, I just played around with different values together – for one pair of repeats I used the same colors and just switched background and foreground colors. For another pair I used the same background and used different value yarns for the foreground pattern.

Then using a different stitch pattern I did a kind of gradient by moving from one color to another. Here I was looking at how distinct or vague the pattern was depending on how close the yarns were to each other. Here is the swatch with the yarns I was using.

Some of the yarns look pretty different when they are next to each other in balls, but when the pattern is knit up they really blend together! It was an interesting exercise. I have to admin I’m not doing great journaling the exercises at all. Hopefully I will get into it gradually. We shall see!

The other knitting I got done was a bit more work on my distelfink motif. I’m hoping to be done with that one over the next day or two. More on that later!