The first pattern in our 2018 Summer Club, Shadow Prism, started out with this text between me and Andrea:
It's a picture of a skylight, with the recessed wall reflected against the blue sky in the window. It definitely needs to be a shawl. A 2D shawl with the right colours and angles to create a 3D effect.
We talked about a few practical limitations - 600 yds of fingering weight, needs to be a wearable shape, stitch pattern should help emphasize the construction and the 3D effect. Nothing too fiddly, let the yarn do the colour changes for you.
Andrea did a few swatches while I worked away at a colour palette. I don't have pictures of Andrea's first swatches, but she started with a mitered square construction and then considered how to join in other colours without using intarsia.
For the colours, we both liked the blues and yellows in the original skylight picture, but they felt too close to North Shore, one of our club colourways from 2017. So instead I aimed for a sunset-inspired colourway.
A couple coffee dates later, we had these:
Not bad, right? I especially like that first one with the ribbing, but we didn't feel it had enough 3D oomph to it. A little more pondering and sketching:
We finally decided on a shape that had the effect we wanted, and that made sense on the technical side of writing a pattern and dyeing yarn.
SHEBAM!
And then some more back and forth, ironing out details. The two of us living in the same city made this collaboration possible - being able to physically touch the same samples and hand off skeins of yarn at the coffee shop made it happen.
And then, whala, a scarf! (Andrea is a fast knitter.)
