Islamic tiles and a fair isle

I really want to work on something with a lot of color and I've always loved tile work.  I was thinking of designing a fair isle with these for inspiration .....  Some of these would keep the colors all blue - the first and last picture for example.  Or, if you worked from the Dome of the Rock,  you could a gold body (maybe alternate rows or do 1x1 rows of different golds to keep the body from looking flat) with an intricate yoke and edges?



Here's some initial color picks from Knitpicks in Palette ...

Color ideas

I have tile work on the brain and I love these colors - fair isle vest anyone?

Capitol ceiling

Scrollwork outside the Capitol

Scrollwork outside the Capitol

Happy Thanksgiving

Working on the Kauni is like eating potato chips or something; once you get going on the colors changing, you want to keep going to see how they'll resolve themselves.  This is the front steek and left hand side front, hence the pattern weirdness.

In other news, we went to Hilton Head.  It was amazing.

Hmmmmm

Okay, the linen stitch pull over, I want to do it again, in wool, for fall. Inside out st. st. this time and I'm really taken with Knitpicks City Tweed.

But what color? Colors?
A bunch of the blues and greens or browns and greys? A V pattern with a march of colors up the body, or get 2 and work together into a marl?

Help!

Slow and steady

Haven't been away, or anything, really. I've just been plugging along on some stuff that's fun, but not real photogenic in terms of progress reports.
(We have been going biking on the Silver Comet and Chief Ladiga trails every day we can get away with it. AWESOME. The small one got his birthday present early, because, let's face it, biking 15-20 miles per day on only one gear just isn't as much fun as it could be. If you live in the area and like biking, I highly recommend these trails.)
Funnily, everything I'm working on is blue, or blue/purple/green. Summer I guess. Here's Soryu - I've finished about 600-plus yards (I measured them out tonight) and have about half the fleece left to spin. Nice, soft, good balance once I set it, but no spring -- but I want to swatch it, I think it would have a nice drape as a fabric. Maybe on 6's.
And here are the stars - slow and steady wins the race on this one. It's pretty fiddly intarsia, so about half an hour a night is all I want to do. I think I need to start the fisherman's shirt design -- I need some straight knitting.

More stars

Almost done with the second row of stars.
Piplup and Turtwig didn't like the loud thunderstorm we were having, so they (along with the little one, Panda and Riolu) got up to help me take this picture.
Knitting looks better with friends, doesn't it?

Thanks, Mom

Or, I should probably say "Great Aunt Iris" (You may be wondering "what is she talking about now???").
Okay; here's the story:
My mother was taught sewing and needlework by her Aunt Iris in the 1940's. Iris was a school teacher, botanist, grammarian, gosh knows what else, but also a truly excellent seamstress. And she drilled into my mom that if the back of your work doesn't look just as neat and nice as the front, you're doing it incorrectly. (I'd have said "wrong", but I suspect Iris would say "incorrectly" so there you go, homage to Iris.) So . . .
Here's the stars intarsia, front view. Not bad, I like it. I totally broke form this time and measured the pieces of yarn. Yup, measured how long a stitch was, and I've measured out all the bits to piece together each star (I use 2 pieces for each star and for each lining as I split each star in half to minimize carrying the yarn in the back).
And here it is from the back.
I never got to meet my great Aunt Iris, but I think she'd think this passed the test.
But I bet she'd think my color choices are gaudy beyond all belief.

Not actually shielding her identity . . .

With the small purple ball of yarn. Yup.
Still not happy with my idea for the hand painted.
Need to swatch it (is swatch actually a verb?) but I'm thinking hand painted background, purple outlines, dark teal stars.

Sounds workable to me, but I need to see it to see if the balance works as I imagine. The thing about this Fassett pattern is that this one is intarsia, which makes it very labor intensive - I guess in the best-of-all-possible-worlds, one would measure from the pulled out swatch what each pattern component requires, then pre-cut all the yarn pieces to the right length.

I'm just not that, um, careful (be polite). Nope, I do intarsia with each part of the pattern attached to a nearly full sized ball, and just shove the shaggy thing in a pillowcase when I'm not actually working on. Maybe I'll have a sample in a day or 2 to share.