Opus Knitting Patterns was begun on Ravelry in 2011 by Funkyforty (Mel Browne) and Cablemabel (Linda OCarroll) who wanted to design something exciting as a way to use up the plainer yarns in our stashes. But all sorts of yarns got sucked into the vortex, and some rather surprising designs came out of it. Now it’s just designing for fun, and we find we can’t stop. We have more ideas than we can carry out. There are many more designs in the pipeline, so please watch this space, and follow Mel’s podcasts. And don’t miss Mel’s designs on Rav! (There is also Mel’s blog. on our website, which will be updated in due course). Linda and Mel.

Our pattern names
Some people have been puzzled by our pattern names Opus and Untititled, and the numbers. There have always been lots of lovely artwork names around, such as girls’ names and references to beautiful locations, flora, fauna and so on, and in recent years these have been used for pattern names. When individual designers use those names it is wonderful because it clearly means something real to them - they have met the named girls and visited the pretty locations. However in recent decades some large pattern-producing companies appear to have been inventing sets of albeit pretty names which mean nothing personal to anybody, and handing those name-sets to their designers. The old patterns by Sirdar, Beehive etc. were unpretentiously and rather more honestly numbered.

So our patterns are similarly numbered. Opus just means a piece of work, or an artwork, so that Opus 2500 is just job number 2500. If we were to produce other designs using the same technique, style or pattern stitch, we would call them Opus 2501, 2502 etc., so that the numbers do mean something.

Untitled is a reference to artworks by those great masters who were so prolific that most of their works had no names, so that they are referred to in catalogues as Untitled XI, XII etc., and sometimes those numbers are arranged to reflect a series of connected and exploratory works. Some of our designs which are a bit too arty for most people’s everyday wear are called Untitled as a joke reference to art catalogues.

But don’t think we have any objection to the big knitting-pattern-design companies - we are huge fans of all of them. Our pattern names are just a quiet smile and wink at big-company pattern names which don’t mean anything. And we have noticed with pleasure that some people who have knitted our designs have given their projects their own personal names - lovely!

Freebies
Some of the patterns below have been given away free on Ravelry for some years. However there have been reports of large scale abuse of free Ravelry patterns on a well-known auction site. For this reason our patterns on this page are no longer free, but:
(1) If you purchase a pattern on or after 28 April 2015 and would like to send us your completed-project link, we would be happy to offer you a free pattern (of the same price or lower) of your choice from this page.
(2) If your forum is running a not-for-profit knitalong which officially includes one of our patterns, we would be happy to offer that pattern free to your KAL knitters.