New patterns: Orfeo Hat & Cowl

This pair of patterns has been almost a year in the making, and my obsession with stranded colourwork is still going strong! The Orfeo Hat & Cowl feature colourwork inspired by the decorative stamped motifs found in seventeenth-century books and music scores. I enjoy spotting all the little decorative elements when I’m looking through an old music score, finding something new to sing or checking a detail of an old favourite, and when I find a motif that has knitting-design potential I do a quick sketch and make a note of where I found it. The IMSLP database is a fantastic treasure trove of public-domain music scores, and it’s where I go to find most of my sheet music these days.

Warning: more music-historical geekiness ahead!

The motifs I used as the starting point for my Orfeo Hat & Cowl come from some early editions of music by Claudio Monteverdi, one of my top two favourite composers (the other is J.S. Bach). The same tiny, tiling motifs appear on the title page of Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo (1609) and his Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), which were both published by Venetian music printer Ricciardo Amadino. You can see the motifs below, forming the border of a page.

Motifs which can be combined in various different configurations are brilliant for creating a stitch pattern, and the shape of these reminds me of elaborate lyres or c-clefs. To create my colourwork pattern I traced enlarged versions of the motifs onto squared paper and added clean straight lines to contain them. To me, the contrast between the elements creates movement and drama, and feels very baroque.

The yarn I chose for my samples is Outlaw Yarn’s Bohemia Sport (45% Polwarth, 45% Alpaca, 10% Possum; 183yds/167m per 50g skein). When I was still at the swatching stage for these designs I asked around on Instagram for recommendations for good yarn for stranded colourwork, and I’m glad I went with this suggestion. It’s soft and warm, the fuzzy halo helps the stitches ‘mesh’ well without obscuring the design, and it can be worked at a tight gauge, which is how I prefer my colourwork.

I used half a skein of each colour for the hat, and a little over one skein of each colour for the cowl - so if you’d like a matching set, two skeins of each colour will be plenty. The colours I picked are Parchment for the hat’s main/background colour (MC), Gaslight for the cowl’s MC, and Leadlight for the contrast/motif colour (CC) for both. Leadlight has unfortunately been discontinued since I knit my two samples, but the new colour Erebus is a great substitute - it’s a dark blue/charcoal shade, whereas Leadlight was plain black.

I chose the Twisted German Cast On for both the hat and cowl because it’s quite substantial as well as stretchy, but you can use any cast on you prefer for 1x1 ribbing, e.g. Tubular, Long Tail, Alternate Cable, etc. I used this tutorial to remind myself how to work the Twisted German method: Photo Tutorial: Twisted German / Old Norwegian Cast-On.

Once you get into the colourwork, there will be some rounds with longer floats which you will need to ‘trap’ on the reverse side. I found a few good tutorials for this, including Andrea Rangel’s Catching Floats in Colorwork, Dianna Walla’s trapping long floats in stranded colorwork, and Ann Kingstone’s Trapping Floats. It does interrupt the flow of your knitting, but I feel it’s worth it to tidy up the long floats so they won’t snag on things and pull your stitches out of place.

Orfeo Hat features:

• a stranded colourwork beanie knit in the round from the bottom up

• swirling colourwork motifs which grow out of the corrugated ribbing of the brim, and simpler abstract colourwork in the crown shaping

• hat dimensions: 18”/46cm circumference and 8.5”/21.5cm length, to fit adult head sizes ranging from 19-22”/48-56cm head circumference

• requires 101yds/92.5m of the main/background colour (MC) + 102yds/93.5m of the contrast/motif colour (CC) in sport- or fingering-weight yarn

• pattern includes charted stitch patterns only.

Orfeo Cowl features:

• a stranded colourwork cowl knit in the round from the bottom up

• swirling colourwork motifs edged with corrugated ribbing

• cowl dimensions: 27”/68.5cm circumference and 10”/25.5cm height

• requires 216yds/197m of the main/background colour (MC) + 209yds/191m of the contrast/motif colour (CC) in sport- or fingering-weight yarn

• pattern includes charted stitch patterns only.

The Orfeo Hat and Orfeo Cowl patterns are available on Ravelry and Payhip, both individually and as an ebook (with a reduced price per pattern).

Melbourne for beginners

Well, I'm finally here! Yesterday was my first full day in Melbourne.

In the morning, Willie and I headed out to brunch with a friend at a fantastic place in Hardware St, which was well worth the wait for a table. I had a pot of French Earl Grey tea, and some delicious baked eggs with asparagus. I managed to drip pistou down my front, but luckily I had my trusty Bright Side scarf to cover up the evidence. ;)

By the time we got back to our apartment we were both severely in need of a nap, especially as I never sleep well in a new bed, and my day of travelling on Saturday was pretty draining. When we woke up, there was just enough time to get dressed up, grab a bite to eat, and scramble to get to the Arts Centre for the performance of L'Orfeo. We just made it (hurrah)!

It was amazing to hear this live! The instruments in particular sounded fantastic, in various colourful combinations of violins, viols, lirone, recorders, cornetti, sackbutts, harpsichords, organ, regal, theorbos, Baroque guitars, and percussion.

After the opera, we walked home and again collapsed with exhaustion.
I expect I'll start to feel more like myself in a few days, but until then I'll have to try to take it easy...

Monday night Monteverdi

Last night I went to a Baroque Voices concert, and had a lovely Monteverdi overdose! "The Full Monte: Concert 3" was full of madrigals for different configurations of up to five voices, some accompanied by bass viol plus theorbo or chitarrino. A theorbo, by the way, is a kind of long-necked lute (I think they look really cool with their outrigger strings - see below!), and a chitarrino is a kind of small guitar (I think that's one in the painting below).

Theorbo player, c.1615

The music for this concert was mainly from Monteverdi's third book of madrigals (1592), with some added highlights from the seventh book (1619). Baroque Voices is performing all nine books over the course of their "Full Monte" series - quite an undertaking! To give you an idea of the style of music, here's a video of some of the same singers doing a piece from the second book of madrigals (from their last concert, in April):

And one with instruments accompanying:

The concert was directed by soprano Pepe Becker, who conducted the group occasionally as necessary. The texts of the madrigals are your standard Baroque fare: love-lorn shepherds and shepherdesses, lovers and fair ladies, heroic knights and wicked sorceresses. A neat addition to the concert was the declamation (in impassioned Italian) of some of the texts by David Groves, who had translated them for the programme.

The venue was Wellington's Sacred Heart Cathedral - a slightly odd choice for a secular-themed concert. The interior is a neo-classical pink-and-white confection that always makes me think of meringues or ice-cream cakes!

Sacred Heart Cathedral, in all its pink-and-white glory

One of the most enjoyable aspects (for me) was that lots of the music was unfamiliar. This is the beauty of an unabridged concert series - you don't just hear the same few most-popular works, you get surprises too! Only one of the pieces was one I'd sung before: Ahi, sciocco mondo cieco, a soprano duet which Theresa and I sang for a choir party item once upon a time. Monteverdi is so much fun to sing! I miss my duet buddies, I do...

Handmade: Day 2

This morning I had choir as usual at St Mary's, but with a couple of incidents that weren't entirely usual. During Mass, Olivia and I sang the Monteverdi duet we'd been working on (a 'Salve Regina' setting), and it went really well. We'd had a good run-through before Mass, which helped our confidence a lot. I'm even getting more used to leading now. But alas, Olivia is departing to Berlin to pursue her art career. The choir had a farewell lunch (bring-a-plate style), and it was all a bit sad. But she has promised to return after a year or so, and keep us up-to-date with her adventures via email.

Afterwards, I headed over to Te Papa for more crafting at the knit lounge. I hadn't signed up for any classes for today, so I just hung out and did some spinning and knitting and chatting. A couple of people had brought their spinning wheels, which was cool to watch. I started spinning some rainbow merino on my wee turkish spindle (both recently acquired).

When I got sick of spinning, I switched to working on the little knitted bag that I started at yesterday's two-handed knitting class. Happily, I still remembered how to do it! Still awkward, but I shall keep practising. Eventually I started making mistakes and dropping needles, so I took a hint and called it a day. Time to curl up with a pot of tea and my kindle... :)

Singing at St Mary's

I'm a member of the St Mary of the Angels choir, which is great for my general confidence with singing - performing in public at Mass every week is fantastic for learning to deal with nerves! The choir does lots of Renaissance polyphony, as well as plainchant and various other styles of liturgical music. I've been singing with them for ten years now, and my singing has improved in every respect since I started. Of course, my lessons with the choir director, Robert, have had a lot to do with that.

This Easter my friend Olivia and I sang a Monteverdi duet for two sopranos with two violins accompanying, plus organ and Robert's viola da gamba for the continuo part. Monteverdi is one of my absolute favourite composers, so this was a real treat for me. I've also been learning a solo from Handel's Messiah, which I sang after Mass, once the choir had had our annual Easter treat of singing the Hallelujah Chorus!

My family was in town briefly for a get-together near Wellington, and Dad recorded some of the music. Because we were performing at Mass rather than at a concert, there was a fair amount of background noise (from babies during the duet, and conversations during my after-Mass solo). It's still great to be able to hear how we did. Evidently I need to learn to project my consonants more clearly in such a resonant building. ;)

Our duet (with bonus baby accompaniment):

And my Handel solo is here.