Lorna's Laces has released their most recent colorway in their Color Commentary series; a series in which a prominent author or knitblogger works closely with Lorna's Laces to design a signature colorway. The first in the series was Franklin's Panopticon, the second was Amy's Office, the third was Roadside Gerry, and the fourth is Clara's Garden. What a lovely, spring color!
Clara Parkes is the creator of Knitters Review, and is a fixture in the knitting community for her own writing and contributing to popular publications such as Interweave Knits Magazine. I've had the honor of interviewing Clara myself a couple years ago, and here are her thoughts about the color she created, Clara's Garden:
I’ll admit it, I have a thing for pink. Friends tease me about it as, again and again, I inevitably add yet more pink-hued yarns to my stash. I can’t help it – done right, pink is an exquisite color. I’m not talking about the oft-maligned pink of Pepto Bismol and bubble gum, but the elegant, nuanced, womanly hues of Mary Cassatt paintings, of peonies and hollyhocks and tulips. I know of no pink in nature that is not beautiful.
When Beth asked me to create a color with her, my mind immediately turned to those peonies, hollyhocks, and tulips—all three of which I have in my garden. They are pink, yes, but they have elements of yellow and white in them as well. I sent her a picture of a pale pink peony with hints of yellow stamens at the very center, and that’s where we began.
Translating a picture or a feeling into yarn is one thing—but doing it in such a way that you end up with a yarn that conveys this same feeling when knit up, that requires true skill. While I said what I liked, Beth knew how to make it happen, and in that regard, this was a truly collaborative process.
She first pulled three common colors from my picture—pink, yellow, and purple—and we started there. (We agreed right up front that we’d focus on the flower itself and not complicate matters by bringing in any green.) She dyed several skeins of sock yarn to start, each with different saturations and lengths of color placed at varying spots along the skein. While the skeins looked nearly identical at first, their differences quickly revealed themselves when I started swatching. In one skein, those innocent-looking yellow dabs became popcorny globs when knitted up—and the colors looked darker than I’d envisioned, pooling in an unattractive, oil-slick kind of way.
One more trip back to the drawing board. We opened the curtains on our Mary Cassatt drawing room and let the light in, pulling the purple and replacing it with white, lightening the pink, and transforming the yolky yellow into a pale and delicate buttercup. The next test skeins were much happier.
Many thanks to Clara and the ladies of Lorna's Laces for bringing us yet another gorgeously inspriring colorway!
by Carol Sulkoski. Shibui gave me the below images to share with you, and I have to say that they are inspiring all sorts of color combinations- I'm thinking Orchid and Mulberry would be nice as well.