One way to knit a natural-looking scene is to work with several similar shades of each color, but only one or two rows of one color at one time, which is what we will do in the Garden of Design workshop at this year’s Iwannaknit ReTreat. This method makes for lots of ends and long floats up the side of the knitting, as you can see in this photo of my class sample background in progress.
Luckily, the edges of this piece will be bound like the edges of a quilt. All those ends and long floats will be trimmed away or hidden inside the binding.
Knitting one row of a particular yarn means that it often hangs on the other end of the row, when you need it. Ultimate Sweater Machine users simply pick up the carriage and move it to the other side to pick up the thread.
Hand-knitters use double-pointed or circular needles to take care of this problemâ€if the yarn you want is at the other end of the row, just knit from the needle closest to the yarn.
I like to use the purl side of stockinette stitch as the right side in a picture. The colors blend better. I think it looks more natural.
The next step is to stabilize and quilt this background piece, and I hope to report back to you no later than Tuesday evening, with this step finished. Then it will be time to knit some foreground elements, like clumps of greenery and close-up flowers.
Remember the four yards of perfectly matching pink yarn I wrote about yesterday? My daughter came to the rescue. She had a partial skein of the very same yarn in her stash. There’s a good reason for teaching one’s children how to knit and crochet. In case you are wondering, it was her yarn to begin with. Wonder how those four yards came to be in my box of pink yarn?