Twist Collective Closing

Hello friends! You may have heard that Twist Collective will be closing down at the end of the year. What does that mean for all of you who have bought a Twist Collective pattern? Well, it depends on the designer. In my case, I plan on continuing to offer Celestarium through my own store. I've been in contact with Twist Collective and the transition should go smoothly enough that no one will notice any difference.

For those of you who have bought the pattern, I won't have a record of your purchase, but any update made to the pattern will still show up in your ravelry library. Pattern support will move from Twist Collective to me. The fastest way to get help will be by contacting me on my bear-ears ravelry account.

Celestarium's Sister

It has begun. Celestarium's sister, Southern Skies is now being test knit. 

It won't be long now...

Celestarium In The Wild

This past weekend I spent time at Stitches West. And I'm proud to report that I saw some Celestarium shawls in the wild! 

I was introduced to the first one through a friend because it was still a WIP. Marie is closing in on finishing her version, which is made of Colinette Jitterbug. It looks great already.

Standing in the Abstract Fiber booth

I heard Alison (on the right), was going to be at Stitches, so we arranged to meet up. She did her version in a laceweight by JaggerSpun and added a border to give it more heft. Pictures do not do it justice. Later on, whenever we passed each other in the market place, we pointed to each other and shouted something like, "Awesome shawl!" 

My buddy David is on the left

The sighting of this version was truly serendipitous. I met up to have a dinner with the South Bay Knitters. As we were leaving, my buddy Vivian said, "Hey, isn't that a Celestarium?" The owner in question was outside, walking to her car. So Vivian and I did what was only logical; we ran after the Celestarium yelling, "Is that a Celestarium?!" Jen was kind enough to stop and let us take a bunch of pictures. Her version is made of Tosh Merino Light in the Volga colorway.

At Pedros

The last sighting was one that I did know about. This Celestarium was at the Blue Moon Fiber Arts booth.It was the version I knit up for Twist Collective out of Blue Moon's Seduction in the Haida colorway. I had gotten an email a few weeks ago asking if Blue Moon could borrow the shawl to display at their booths at Madrona and Stitches West. After doing a little dance in front of the computer, I sent a polite "Yes."

Blue Moon Fiber Arts booth

Stitches West was loads of fun. The inevitable "Loot I Got At Stitches" post will be coming up soon. And let me tell you, I did some damage.

Celestarium Future

I am thrilled that Celestarium has been embraced so enthusiastically. I just wanted to say thank-you. And thank-you to everyone who has left me such uplifting comments. I have had a smile on my face for nearly a week now. 

So what does the future hold? Well, I have had requests for a matching Celestarium that features the southern skies. So I plan on working on that soon. I already have the yarn.

The Making Of Celestarium

Celestarium started it's life in early 2011 with the question, "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a shawl that was also a star chart." Of course knitting a star chart seemed utterly crazy. How do you even chart something circular that has no pattern repeats. Although the idea was neat enough to earn a sticky note on what my brother lovingly refers to as the "Beautiful Mind" wall, it seemed impossible, so I tried my best to think about other things.

Except that the idea kept bugging me. It seems obvious now, but it took me 6 months to determine that the only way to chart the sky accurately was to make a circular chart. After an unsuccessful search for a circular pi shawl chart, I ended up building one in Illustrator using a polar grid as a starting point. Eventually the chart was printed out, taped together, and hung on my window so I could refine the design.

Being from the northern hemisphere, Polaris seems like the logical center of the shawl. That ended up being the only easy star to chart. As it turns out, there is no standardization to constellations, so several sources had to be checked for each constellation before adding them to the chart.

The next big job was to make the piece knit-able. A big circular chart is wonderful for graphing, but an absolute nightmare to knit from. I toyed with different ways to keep track of star placement, but settled on placing a stitch marker every 72 stitches. Star positions were refined to make sure there were exactly 72 stitches in between each marker. No marker has to be moved in order to get the star placement correct. Additionally, all increase rounds do not have any stars, which makes the knitting go much smoother. As a bonus, the pattern includes a chart of the constellations so you know exactly what you have knit.

After 18 months of development, I finally was able to knit up the first version. Call it a coincidence or Providence, but right as I was looking into publishing the pattern Twist Collective's mood board landed in my inbox. One of the themes was macrocosmos with an image of stars. The rest is history.

Image by Jane Heller

Celestarium

Remember way back in May when I was taking an un-vacation to work on Giant Super Secret knitting. Well, the proverbial cat is out of the bag. I have a pattern in the Winter 2012 Twist Collective! It's name is Celestarium and it is pleased to meet you. 

 

I had secretly hoped Jane Heller would photograph this. She did. I can die happy.

Celestarium is a pi shawl that is an accurate view of the night sky from the North Pole. The center eyelet/ bead combination represents Polaris. It took me a year and a half to develop. And I was nuts enough to knit two of them. One to see if it was possible and a second for the publication.

I plan to talk more in depth how this even came to be, but it is rather late in my bit of the world and I have work in the morning. (Let's see if I can even get to sleep. This is just so terribly exciting.)