Coloring for Knitting
Adult coloring books were all the rage a few years ago. The ideal creative hobby to relax with a bit of nostalgia . To be honest it’s the perfect creative activity to take up in these uncertain times. During their peek I had many friends ask why I hadn’t worked on any adult coloring books in my illustration work. So I took that challenge and found a way to combine it with knitting and integrate it into my design process.
I’m not one to usually follow a knitting pattern completely. I love stranded color work or fair isle knitting but the charts never matched my colorful vision. How to solve that problem? Why not color your own chart a la adult coloring! That is the moment the concept for Color & Knit Mittens was born. A coloring book for knitters to customize their own charts to their colors of choice with pattern directions for mittens while enjoying the relaxing nostalgia of a coloring book!
Working on this book opened my eyes to the benefits of working and designing using charts to color. If you were ever unsure of how certain colors you have might look together in a motif or design, this is the way to test it out before knitting a single stitch. By coloring a chart, you can get a rough idea of what your finished project would look like. It is also an opportunity to really customize the chart and your project. You can break add accent color stripes running through the center of a motif similar to what is done in traditional fair isle knitting.
All of my self published colorwork patterns now feature pages with charts you can color in.
You can create your own coloring pages for any pattern you are working on with some grid paper, a thin black pen and colored pencils.
Need some grid paper? You can print your own grid paper.
Let me walk through how to create your own:
With a black pen, start drawing outlines for the shapes in your pattern around the number of squares or stitches you need on the grid paper. The black lines are your boundary lines and will show you where your motifs are to color in. You want a relatively thin pen so as not to overpower your coloring but visible enough to see the outline of the shapes you are copying down.
Now for the fun part- coloring! A little coloring tip for you: if you are using dark colors in your chart, don’t color in your squares too dark that you can’t see the number of squares or stitches!
Want to delve into a little coloring before taking it to your knitting. Enjoy a free download of one page from Värvi ja Kingi / Color and Gift, the first coloring book I created for a publisher in Estonia.
This book features pages that can be cut into little postcards and gift tags besides full size pages showcasing various elements of Estonian culture, handicrafts and patterns. This book was created for the Christmas but can be enjoyed all year round.