Recently in 3 Ply Targhee Log Cabin Category
If you're wondering why my Thursday posts have become a little sparse, it mostly has to do with the fact that Wednesday night is "date night" for John and I and by the time I get back from dinner, I'm often feeling a little bit tired. In general, I've had pretty good energy levels while I've been pregnant, but it does seem like I get to a certain point at night where I just get sleepy. When that happens before I post, it usually means no post.
Anyway, onto my next log cabin block. While I don't have a lot of light colored yarn, I do have a little bit that I want to intersperse into the blocks. So for this next block I built my colors off of the central block (which has red/brown earth tones) but I also included one block of that light colored yarn that is a complete contrast with the rest of the yarn in the square.
On of the things I've been thinking about since I started quilting, was building a series of blocks that were mostly black and white prints and having the occasional block that would have one small element of a primary color (inspired by some Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass pieces I've seen). In my head, what makes these blocks interesting is not the black and white prints, but that contrasting splash of color. In this block, I wanted 4 out of the 5 blocks to have the same depth of shade and to share one or more colors (in this case, the red and brown tones can be found in 4 of the 5 blocks and the blue and aqua tones can be found in 3 of the 4) and have the 5th block just pop out, but still have colors that would work with the colors in the other 4 "logs" in the log cabin. The light green block co-ordinates with the others (blue and green go together well in my book and there are some subtle yellow shades that go with the browns and reds in the other colorway) but also stands out because the depth of shade is so much lighter.
Does it work? It does for me, at least in this block. Clearly I'll have to make a few more and start looking at them all together to really know. But I think it was a good experiment.
This is the first square that I did for the Mountain Colors 3 Ply Targhee project. I used US size 8 (5.0 mm) needles and cast on 8 stitches for the center square so that I would have a starting center square of about 2" and a final square of about 6" x 6" (gauge translation: 4 stitches and 8 rows to 1" in garter stitch). The resulting fabric has a nice thick texture, perhaps a bit thicker than you'd want for a blanket, moving into the range that I think most hot pads fall into.
For this square, I started off with the random grab idea. After I converted all the skeins into balls, I reached in and pulled out a color at random and started the square. The next four colors were more or less determined the same way. This is when I realized that if I really did things this way, I would probably end up with a lot of some colors left as I progressed through the project. But I was generally pleased by the fact that random selection led to something that was pretty coherent in color.
To begin with, this square is a good deal less bright in real life than it appears in this picture (I had to use my old camera to snap the photos because I had temporarily misplaced my little Canon) due to the camera's tendency to saturate reds and the fact that it was a very bright day when I took the photo. But the general trends are okay. There's not really much color selection process to speak of since the selections were random. But you can see how there is some brown that moves through almost all 5 blocks, there are muted autumnal reds in 4 out of the five, autmnal blues in 3 out of the 5 and golds and greens in 2 of the 5. I think this is why they work together in a not-too-jarring way. There's definite color overlap in all the colorways. If I was to replace any brick, it would be the one on the top left... in both this picture and it real life it's a bit brighter in tone than the rest of the colors. But for random, its acceptable.
My favorite colorway in the group is the one in the center. I believe it's called "Goldrush" (none of the mill ends came with any color identifiers) and the golds and greens and reds are lovely and autumnal. Very evocative of maple trees in the fall. Fortunately, I also have a reasonable amount of this color, so I'll be able to use it liberally throughout the project.
Last December I travelled to Montana on business and managed to include a side trip to Mountain Colors
. I hadn't really been intending to acquire much yarn, but when I found the box of 3 Ply Targhee mill ends I did what I could to make room in my suitcase to bring home my own version of a Bitterroot Rainbow*. When I got them home, I couldn't resist coverting them from hanks into balls so that I could play with some simple but randomly colored log cabin squares.
For no particular reason (other than, perhaps, being easily distracted) the yarn got wound into balls but never actually started it's journey into log cabin squares. My fiber room is now on its way to becoming the nursery,** and as a part of the transformation, I re-discovered my basket of 3 Ply Targhee balls waiting patiently for me. And since it's still going to be a little while before I get back to sweater knitting, and I'm done with the other log cabin blanket project, I decided to play around with some new log cabin squares.
This time, however, I am coming at the project with very few pre-conceived notions of where I want to go. I think, instead, I am going to use this project as an opportunity to play with color. One thing that intrigues me greatly about quilting is how easy it is to do color studies. I love to start with a simple idea or favorite fabric and then run around a store looking for things that work with it. You can do this in knitting, but it is somewhat more complicated because knitting a log cabin square takes a good deal more time than cutting pieces out of fabric and machine sewing them together. But this targhee yarn is a heavy worsted so it knits up on fairly large needles. The variagations provide the same kind of opportunity to do a color study as if I was pulling fabrics down froma store wall. Knitting up a simple block (a center square surrounded by an outer square) takes relatively little time (probably an hour and a half or so) so I can start to see the results quickly, at least from the perspective of a knitting project.
I have created a few simple rules for this project:
- Each log cabin square is composed of 5 color sections. Each section must be a different color.
- The first colorway can be pulled from the basket at random, but the remaining 5 colors should "interact" with the first colorway by sharing some color component with one of the other blocks that it touches.
- A block is not considered finished until the ends have been woven in.
Initially I was just going to pull balls at random and let things lay how they would, but I have a great deal more of some colors than others, so I need to determine the order of the colors so that colors I have more of end up in the larger blocks. Otherwise, I suspect I will end up unable to maintain my desire to have 5 different colors in each square.
For the rest of this week, I'm going to show you the first four squares that I've worked up as part of this project, and I'll try to talk about why I put the colors together that I did in hopes that it encourages other people to take a stab at playing with color.***
* Mountain Colors is located in Montana's Bitterroot Valley and one of their signature colorways is called Bitterroot Rainbow.
** This was always what the room was intended for, it just took us longer to get to the point where we needed a nursery than I thought it would and since we weren't using the room for anything else, it became a space to store my fiber-related toys. Now, plans are underway to create a better creative space for me in our office so that Miss Z can have a creative space of her own.
*** And, hopefully, it will also give me some time to work on my other ongoing projects which have been going rather slowly as I work on house organization projects related to preparing for our new arrival.
