Faded Flare Wrap in Zen Yarn Garden’s New Impressionist Collection

Yarn for the giveaway was provided by Zen Yarn Garden.

Say hello to my newest knit design, the Faded Flare Wrap. This bold pattern is now available as part of Zen Yarn Garden’s Impressionist Collection, alongside 5 other stunners! (And I am beyond honored to have designed for the same collection as these talented folks!) Designing for collections is so fun! Today, I want to tell you a little bit about the collection, the inspiration behind Faded Flare, and give you a chance to win a Faded Flare Kit!

About the collection

I’ll leave it to Zen Yarn Garden to describe the overall collection:

“We are thrilled to announce our premiere pattern collection, The Impressionist Collection. We challenged designers to design pieces inspired by the great impressionist painters, and each one dreamed up patterns which are truly works of art! You can purchase project kits including both the yarn and pattern in our online store, as well as purchase individual PDF copies of the patterns on Ravelry. We  hope you enjoy learning more about this extra-special collection and the fabulous designers behind it, too. Enjoy!”

About Faded Flare

My colorful contribution to the collection is the Faded Flare Wrap. If you enjoyed knitting my Intarsia Mountain pattern, this project is right up your alley! There’s lots of intarsia to create a large flare motif across the piece, and there’s some fading across rows to capture a landscape in yarn. The whole piece is framed and stabilized with a slipped stitch border.

“The Faded Flare Wrap uses vivid, contrasting colours, intarsia, and fading between colours to paint a vivid picture with yarn. If you’ve never knit intarsia before, now is the time to start! Heidi includes links to her excellent tutorials for how to tackle larger intarsia projects so you’ll be sure to learn some new skills. In Faded Flare, each colour fades into the next to capture the impression of a late sunset happening behind an island in silhouette, inspired by Claude Monet’s painting San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk.”
Click here to view pattern details on Ravelry.
Click here to purchase yarn & project kits from Zen Yarn Garden.

The Inspiration: Claude Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk

Basically, Zen Yarn Garden’s call for designs said that our submissions needed to be inspired by impressionist painters. The call was hot on the heels of publishing Intarsia Mountain, so I was intrigued by the idea of interpreting a work of art fairly directly as a knit design using intarsia. I spent a couple hours scrolling through online galleries featuring some of the great Impressionist painters’ work, thinking I probably wouldn’t have a jolt of inspiration, but then… Monet.

Wouldn’t you know it, I found a new-to-me (don’t @ me) Monet painting, San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk. The primary color base! The silhouette captured on the water! The sunset! I knew that something was clicking when I kept thinking about how well Zen Yarn Garden’s truly artistic colorways would suit my idea. And while still colorwork, the concept is straightforward enough: an intarsia silhouette for the island and its reflection, surrounded by a fade among yarns dyed in coordinating colors to produce a knitting pattern that really looks like a painting.

Are You Picking Up What I’m Putting Down?

If you enjoy my new design, even if it’s just to look at, don’t forget to queue it or give it a quick heart/Favorite on Ravelry. That helps get it in front of more knitters’ eyeballs! And now through May 31, Zen Yarn Garden is offering 15% off kits for Faded Flare and all of the Impressionist Collection designs using the code IMPRESSIONIST15.

Win a Faded Flare Kit!

One lucky winner will get a Faded Flare Wrap kit, a.k.a. 3 skeins of Zen Yarn Garden’s Superfine Fingering yarn! Giveaway is open to U.S. only. ARV $78. Enter in the box provided below or here.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Yarn for the giveaway was provided by Zen Yarn Garden.