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. 🙂

Now, about the pattern itself:

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!

About the Gorgeous Yarn Kits:

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

To make your own yarn kit from stash:

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.

Colour Advice:

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.)

To custom-make your own colour palette with yarns from your stash (or your LYS), here are a few suggestions. Feel free to tag me on Instagram with a picture of your yarn ideas if you have any questions.

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.

In-Person Vineyard Murder Mystery Knitalong at Maker Savvy & KIN Vineyards:

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.

Online Vineyard Mystery Knitalong:

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!

Are you looking for some interesting summer knitting? How about something in a nice, light cotton-linen blend, with pretty stripes and lace, that feels good to knit and even better to wear? And how about a knitalong and giveaway to make it even more fun?

How about my new shawl pattern?

I had a ton of fun designing this one. And I had to Google the Pythagorean Theorem and relearn how to use it! Be impressed. It was hard.

BUT, now that I’ve done all the hard work, the knitting is easy. And don’t you love how the lace is in the middle instead of at the edge? Yeah, I wanted to try something different. Just because.

It’s kind of like having a necklace in your shawl, right? Fun.

We begin this beauty by casting on along the bottom edge and then working up in growing-and-shrinking stockinette stripes. I made a different kind of decrease along the spine to avoid getting a solid line. Also, I like to try new things.

Here’s where my stupendous, mind-bending math came in: I had to calculate the distance I had for stripes before the lace panel so I could figure out how many pairs of decreasing stripes I could fit in. But first, I had to discover the size of the lace. Then, I had to figure out heights of hypothetical triangles. Really, I barely remember what I did. It’s a blur. But it worked, so I must be amazing.

(I hope you all know me well enough by now to recognize my weird humour. RIGHT? Still waiting for that sarcasm font to be invented by someone more brilliant than I am.)

So what we have here is my favourite kind of knitting: relaxing-yet-not-boring striping stockinette with a splash of interesting thrown in. The lace panel is, as you can see, a field of mesh surrounding some diamonds surrounding some circles. With the exception of one row at the very end, ALL the patterning is worked on the right side, and the wrong sides are all purled.

As with all my patterns, I’ve included both charts AND written instructions. My aim is to please all of the people all of the time. 😉

Some further notes, if you decide to knit a Sea Glass Shawl:

The pattern calls for two balls of CotLin for the lace panel. My test knitter was able to do it with just one, but I needed a small portion of a second ball. We wrote “two” because the last thing I want is for you to be like me and run short of yarn!

There are tips in the pattern about how and when to sew in the ends for those stripes. I really don’t recommend carrying the yarn up the sides because I, personally, don’t like how it looks. But it’s YOUR shawl! Do what you like.

You’re welcome to come knit along with others in my group on Ravelry. I’ll pop in to answer any questions and to ooh and ahh over your colour choices.

That reminds me! I knit my sample shawl in just two colours (Blackberry and Swan), and it looks fabulous, too. What do you think?

Man, it’s hard to photograph Blackberry. It’s actually a super-deep, almost-black purple. It’s really gorgeous. And I like how the high contrast really makes the stripes pop.

But I also love the subtle combination of colours in the Knit Picks sample. Here’s another colour combo — this is actually the one which I had originally envisioned:

As you can see, there are so many beautiful possibilities! I can’t wait to see how everyone else knits this shawl. Seriously, it’s so fun watching project pages pop up on Ravelry.

Now, for the fun part: the giveaway!

I have an ebook copy of the entire CotLin 2014 Collection, and I want one of you to have it. It’s gorgeous. You can check out the entire collection here to see what I mean. (In fact, I kind of want to make at least the Band Camp Pullover for myself. Now that I know how lovely this yarn is, I’m totally tempted. I bet it would make an amazing, cool-yet-warm sweater. The yarn is both laid back and high class at the same time. I guess that’s what you always get when you throw linen in the mix.)

Since I so completely enjoy knitalongs, meeting my fellow knitters, and chatting about colours and projects, I’m going to give the free copy of this ebook to a knitalong participant.

To qualify for the draw:

Head on over to the Aknitica Designs group on Ravelry and tell me what colours you’ll be using to knit your very own Sea Glass Shawl. Will you use three? Only two? Will you go bright or subtle or high-contrast? Let me know in the group’s Sea Glass Shawl Knitalong thread.

You’ll get bonus points (read: extra entries) for every social media share you connect to this post! Share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., and then send me an email at amanda at aknitica dot com with a link to each share. Don’t forget to tag those posts with #SeaGlassShawl

I’ll give you two weeks to enter the draw and order your yarn, and then we’ll get started knitting together!

And then….. da da da DAAAA: At the end of the knitalong, we’ll have another prize! Every finished project will be eligible. I think we’ll have two draws, actually: one for a hard copy of the CotLin 2014 Collection, which I will mail to the winner, and another draw for a free pattern of your choice from my self-published Ravelry patterns.

Yay! I think this will be fun. So, will you be joining me?

Tag: knitalong

Vineyard Mystery Knitalong