All these interviews have made me ready to make the next owl.
I decided to do the intarsia owl next because I found a chart on my hard drive all ready to go, based on the twist stitch owl. I did monkey with the colors a bit, it turns out there are color variations in Northern Saw Whets, so I looked at reference photos on Google Images until I found a pretty one with colors like yarns I had in leftovers or stash. One had an owl sitting in a pine tree, which was great because the green yarn that I had went with the brown yarn better than the blue yarn that I had. I was gambling that the proportions would work from twist stitch to intarsia, since twist stitches pull in, and intarsia does not.
Once I had knit the intarsia base, I duplicate stitched the details on it.
Actually the first chart I’d made had the details, and I simplified it to the intarsia chart above. I was happy with how it turned out, so I’m not going to re-do it, but if I were, I’d knit in the white patches in the tail, body and edges of the face. The more references for embroidery the less I get lost.
One feature of Stitchmastery that makes simplifying colorwork charts easier is that if you are, say turning all of your midtone brown into pale brown, you can highlight the midtone brown in the key, and delete it. a question box will jump up asking which color you wish to replace it with. Then the program re-colors the sections for you.
I love it when the computer does fiddly things for me.
The embroidery took longer than the knitting did, because I cannot count! I actually had to pick out my embroidery 3 times.
My husband and sons are always telling me to use more color in my knitting, so this swatch had a happy reception. If you don’t count the 3 times I picked out the embroidery, this owl has the honor of being knit once from the first chart. It will join other swatches in a bag until there are enough to piece into a blanket. If you want to use this chart on your knitting, or the twist stitch one, be my guest. I’d enjoy it if you sent me a photo though, so I can cheer you on.
My plan is to further simplify the intarsia chart down to a stranded colorwork chart. This is a further gamble, because stranded colorwork (as Naomi told me on Twitter) tends to have square stitches, and intarsia has rectangular ones.
We’ll see what happens.