I really believe that you can knit anything. All it takes is a knowledgeable guide to give your skills a boost.
I teach classes in the Ottawa area and over Zoom. Keep scrolling to sign up!
You can also find my video tutorials on YouTube (and in the “Videos” menu at the top) and written tips and tricks here. I sell knitting patterns here and on Ravelry.com. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook as well for up-to-date pics of the latest things I’m knitting and painting. Thanks for visiting!
Welcome to September and the Vineyard MKAL Clue One!
By now, you should have already received Clue One if you purchased the Vineyard pattern on Ravelry, and I hope you’re having fun.
I’ve recorded a few videos and added them to my aknitica YouTube channel. I love to add tips and tricks to my patterns, and this shawl pattern is no different!
You can find videos showing you:
These are features built in to the Vineyard MKAL shawl pattern. We’re using 7 colours, so I definitely wanted to give everyone the option to keep their balls of yarn intact.
We had an in-person launch for the Vineyard Mystery Knitalong on Wednesday night, at KIN Vineyards in Carp. It was so fun and pretty! There was wine tasting, gourmet pizza, yarn-kit distribution, and a little murder mystery story that Wendy of Maker Savvy adapted for us as a bit of extra fun.
Here I am at the vineyard, with the sunset behind me, feeling a bit awkward about taking a selfie in public. 🙂 I’ve posted a few more photos on my Instagram @aknitica.
There’s still lots of time for you to join in the knitalong with us. The Vineyard MKAL pattern is available on Ravelry, and I’ll be adding a new clue every week, on Wednesdays, until all 6 are available. If you’re holding off until you’ve seen what it’ll look like, spoiler photos will be coming out soon.
For those of you knitting along, you can start posting photos of your progress on Ravelry or Instagram or wherever, and use the hashtag #VineyardMKAL so you can all find each other’s posts. Feel free to use this image as a cover to hide your spoilers:
(Those images are all my paintings, plus one photo I took of my SIL’s garden.)
Happy knitting!
Amanda
What are your knitting goals this autumn? If you’ve been thinking of signing up for fall knitting classes, I’d love to help you with your projects.
I’ll be teaching in Ottawa, Kanata, and Spencerville this fall. And I have a new knitting pattern coming out in September that’s giving me all the cozy autumn vibes. I can’t wait to share it with you!
I host these classes on Sunday afternoons and Tuesday mornings, and anything goes! This is the class for you if you have your own projects on the go and need flexible knitting help.
Here, you can learn a new technique, get help fixing a knitting problem, and ask for tips and tricks on any knitting topic. Bring in your messes, your time-outs, or your next knitting challenge.
Located in Ottawa, at Rideau Park United Church on Alta Vista.
We’re hosting six weeks of mystery knitting with a side of whodunnit at Maker Savvy in Kanata! Our kick-off event is at KIN Vineyards in Carp, with wine tasting, gourmet pizza, and … murder. (No yarn shop employees will be harmed in the making of this event.)
Wendy of Maker Savvy is writing the murder mystery story, and I’ve designed a shawl pattern with six clues to accompany it.
We’ll reveal a new clue each week, starting Wednesday, September 4th at KIN and then every following Tuesday, until the murder mystery is solved and the knitting mystery is cast off.
Join us for fun, knitting, and a finished project of a mysteriously cozy, perfect-for-fall shawl.
Sign up through Maker Savvy. Spaces are limited.
If you can’t join us for the in-person knitalong, you can purchase the pattern on Ravelry and knit with us from anywhere in the world.
Buy the pattern any time, and you’ll receive one clue each Wednesday, starting September 4, 2024, as an automatic pattern update in your Ravelry library.
This my first mystery knitalong (MKAL), and I’d be so excited if you joined us! I’ve designed a cozy shawl that’s all about colours and texture. (Oops. I’ve said too much already.)
It features techniques that are appropriate for adventurous beginners and beyond, and detailed instructions to support all skill levels.
There are lots of colours but no complicated colourwork techniques. One yarn at a time! And only two ends to sew in when you’re done. I have some tricks to show you. 🙂
Learn to knit with this foundational 6-week class. Beginning knitters will learn all the important basics and then some. At the end of these weeks, you’ll be familiar with
This knitting class is in Spencerville, ON, at Spencer Street Muse Gallery, September 25th – October 30th, 2024.
This two-session workshop will be my first art class! I’m so excited.
Expect to learn the methods I’ve collected so far for blending and layering acrylic paints to achieve different effects. If your paints don’t always do what you want them to do, this is the class for you.
In Spencerville, ON, at the Spencer Street Muse Gallery. Sign up via their website. October 5th & 19th, 2024.
Learn the basics of two-colour brioche knitting in this 3-hour workshop.
You’ll learn how to make the brioche knit and purl stitches, how to read brioche knitting patterns, and how to fix mistakes in brioche knitting. If we have time, we’ll also cover common brioche increases and decreases.
November 2, 2024 at Spencer Street Muse Gallery in Spencerville, ON.
Last but not least, I’ve been thinking of adding an online knitting class over Zoom back into my schedule. Or offering it as an option for a one-on-one help session if you can’t make it to an in-person class.
I ran these in 2020-2021 during the stuck-at-home times, and they worked surprisingly well.
What do you think? Would you be interested in a weekly or monthly virtual knitting class? Or the chance to schedule a private session from anywhere?
If there’s enough interest, I’ll start something up.
Stay tuned for more class announcements coming up in my schedule. There are more things in the works all the time.
Until next time!
Happy knitting,
Amanda
Announcing the upcoming Vineyard Mystery Knitalong! Join me in September to kick off autumn and relax after the back-to-school mania. (But let’s not think about THAT just yet.)
You’ll get to feel like a designer as you knit through each section, not knowing where you’ll end up. It’s exciting, isn’t it?
The Vineyard Mystery Knitalong (MKAL) is a shawl pattern of secret shape and design, to be published in 6 installments starting September 4th & 5th, 2024. You’ll receive one clue a week, every Wednesday, each with instructions for creating the next section of the shawl.
I’ll be hosting the MKAL online AND in person, at Maker Savvy in Kanata, Ontario, Canada. If you live nearby, join us for the live events by signing up at makersavvy.ca. We’ll kick off the series at KIN Vineyards in Carp, with a wine tasting, gourmet pizza made with local ingredients, and a murder! (Cue dramatic music… dah dah DAAAAAAH)
All the in-person knitters will be entertained by a chapter of a murder-mystery story that Wendy of Maker Savvy is adapting for us from a free online murder-mystery party outline. Since we’re not entirely sure about the copyright laws of using the free outline in a published pattern, I’m not going to include Wendy’s story with the mkal pattern. Apologies.
So, online, the mkal will be a normal, super-fun, murderless, mysterious knitting pattern. 🙂
If I told you, I’d have to… well, you know the old joke. (In case you don’t, the answer is “kill you.” “I’d have to kill you.” But of course I never would because that would be incredibly rude.)
The Vineyard Mystery Knitalong pattern will be a shawl knit with fingering-weight sock yarn, and it will use 7 colours in total.
It will include stitches in various combinations, and it will be written for all skill levels to follow. You might learn a few new things along the way, and I will include complete instructions for every technique, but there will NOT be brioche. (I love brioche! But Wendy thought I should tone it down a little for this particular project. She’s probably not wrong.)
If you’re a fan of my general style esthetic, which I would call wearable, bold, stylish, and possibly geometric/textural, then let me tell you that I’m designing another shawl that I personally want to wear.
If you like patterns that have periodic shifts in technique and/or stitch patterns to keep your interest, then I’m so your girl! ADHD brains for the win!
You guys. I am super into seasonal colour palette analysis lately. Have you seen this on Insta? I blame my bff, who started me down this rabbit hole, but really, I’m having a blast.
I’ve been dressing in my colours, and I feel so good! (I’m a True Winter / Cool Winter.) And I reeeeeally wanted a yarn kit in my seasonal colours. So… (cue heraldic trumpet notes)… Wendy and I worked with Kat’s Riverside Studio, and they let me put together the colour kits for the pattern from Kat’s gorgeous selection of hand-dyed yarns.
You can order the kits online from makersavvy.ca. I hope you love them as much as I do!!
The Winter Colour Palette:
Clear, cool, high-contrast
MC: noir
Minis: ghost, marylou, chartreuse, cone flower, lapis, and celestial
The Summer Colour Palette:
Cool, muted, soft
MC: faded jeans
Minis: verdigris, rindle, marsh, ballet, wisp, sugar plum
The Spring Colour Palette:
Clear, warm, bright
MC: beryl
Minis: kelpie, lagoon, lipstick, chartreuse, coral, flamingo
The Autumn Colour Palette:
Warm, muted, deep
MC: neptune
Minis: berry, hunter, ochre, russet, moss, mahogany
Use fingering weight sock yarn. My sample is knit in a multi-ply yarn, not singles. I recommend a multi-ply yarn for this particular pattern because it will provide you with a similar stitch definition. But if you want to mix yarn types, that can be fun, too.
MC: 115 g / 440 y / 402 m
Minis: 6 x 25 g / 110 y / 101 m (total 150 g / 660 y / 606 m)
To make a large size, double every yarn amount.
Needles: Size 5 US / 3.75 mm circulars, about 48″ / 120 cm in length from needle tip to needle tip. We’ll be knitting flat.
For the Vineyard Mystery Knitalong shawl, as long as your MC stands out against all your Minis, you should be fine. Some of my kit colours (particularly Summer) have lower contrast levels on purpose, to provide a more muted, hazy appearance to the colour blends.
The MC will be used throughout the entire project, with the Minis playing and running around in various ways and combos. So, the MC will set the overall background tone, and the Minis will affect it in various ways depending on how they’re blended.
I’ve got a few tips on how to choose your own seasonal palette colours, but first, I should explain the difference between a warm and a cool colour.
Warm and cool are relative terms, but for this purpose, warm means it has a yellow / orange base or undertone, and cool means it has a blue or purple base / undertone.
The colour red is also a warm colour (although not as warm as yellow), but if it leans more towards a purple, we call it a cool red. Warm reds lean more towards orange. The red that’s right in the middle, neutral red or true red, is generally considered to be in the True Winter palette, but I’ll leave that up to you.
“Clear” and “muted” has to do with how pure the hue is. The three classic primary colours (hues) are red, blue, and yellow, assuming that each primary is exactly in the neutral centre of its spectrum. When you mix two primaries together, you get either orange (red + yellow), green (yellow + blue), or purple (blue + red). Any secondary colour that’s made of only two primaries in any mix ratio is a “clear” hue.
As soon as you add even a tiny dot of the third primary to any of the secondary colour mixes, you get a more muted version of the clear hue. The muted colours start to lean towards either a grey or a brown, but they still look like colours, not a greyscale.
(To get all the way to a grey, you’d need to add about an equal amount of a warm secondary and a cool primary hue to each other, or vice versa. To get all the way to a brown, combine a warm primary with a warm secondary. But since we’re choosing yarns and not mixing paints or dyes, I’ll stop there.)
Winter Palette principles: Clear, cool, high-contrast
MC: lightest or darkest of all the colours, like black or bright white
Minis:
Choose a variety of shades, like 3 medium, 2 light, and 1 dark, to achieve high contrast with your background. Lean towards bright, cool colours, especially in the medium-shade range.
Summer Palette principles: Cool, muted, soft
MC: a hazy, medium-shade colour
Minis:
Light-to-medium-shade colours in various cool, hazy colours. Add a navy or a milk-tea colour if you want a little more contrast.
Spring Palette principles: Bright, warm, clear
MC: a clear, light, or bright colour
Minis: bright, warm rainbow colours, spring greens, caramels, warm turquoises. Many of the bright colours will be a medium-shade (if you take a photo and turn it to greyscale), but try to choose at least one or two that are lighter and darker for variety. If you like neutrals, try a light cream, caramel, or warm taupe.
Autumn Palette principles: Muted, warm, deep
MC: Your favourite fall colour. Deep turquoise? Russet?
Minis: Any rich, warm colour. Go for a fall foliage palette, or choose all warm turquoises and olive greens for something different. Deep mahogany browns and warm, rich cabernet. Choose a range of shades, from dark to light, for more movement within your hues.
Kick-Off Event: Wednesday, September 4, 2024, at KIN Vineyards. Details when you sign up.
Weekly Classes & Knitalongs: every Tuesday, either afternoon or evening (your choice), starting September 10, 2024, for 5 sessions at Maker Savvy.
Sign up online through Maker Savvy’s website to book your spot and pre-order a Seasonal Colour Palette Yarn Kit by Kat’s Riverside Studios. Pre-orders for the yarn close on July 20, 2024.
Kick-Off Pattern Clue Drop: Wednesday, September 4, 2024 at 11pm (or whenever I arrive home from the Vineyard if I can’t automate it).
Following 5 Pattern Clues: Every Wednesday morning
You can pre-order the pattern from Ravelry at any time, and you’ll receive each pattern update directly to your inbox as they’re released.
To knitalong together online, use the hashtag #vineyardmkal and tag me at aknitica on Instagram. Feel free to ask me for colour advice there, too!
