Celebrating Freeform Knitting

Our member Carol Mellish shares how she created this wonderful cardigan.

Over the years I had accumulated in my yarn stash many small balls(10-20gms)of fine yarn, mainly hand dyed commercial yarn, left over from various weaving/tapestry weaving projects. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away but what to do with them?

I remembered a guild talk on freeform knitting and had acquired an old book titled 900 stitch patterns so decided to play. I sorted my yarns into colour groups and decided to work mainly with reds, oranges and yellows, but added the occasional brown, green and purple as I worked. 

To begin with I crocheted a two-coloured circle then picked up a few stitches from the edge and selected at random, patterns with repeats of 6 or less stiches. Having done enough rows to show the first pattern I cast off, picked up stiches from the side of the piece I had just knitted and tried a different pattern. I continued around the crochet circle and adding on to the knitted pieces until I had a piece that was about 4x6 inches. I made a point of knitting the ends in as I went and was using two or three strands depending on the various thicknessesof the yarn. I was enjoying this so carried on until I had about15 pieces at which point I needed to decide what I was going to do with them.

I considered a bag, throw, blanket etc then found a waistcoat pattern in my fabric stash. I laid out the completed pieces on the pattern and knitted or crocheted to fill gaps and to join them. Then using a long circular needle, I picked up stitches all around the edge and knitted a rib edging (I dyed some yarn to give me enough to do this)

Finally, I found some orange silk fabric (also from my stash!) to line the completed garment.