Version 2.0
Imagine being in the Painted Desert with the eerie buttes striped with blues, grays and browns. Then look up to the desert sky with it’s dazzling night light display of the Milky Way. That was my inspiration for this design.

I love landscape photography, especially the western landscapes and the skies and ever changing light playing tricks on you. I also like to paint with acrylics. This piece comes from my new focus on combining my photography, painting and knitting into fiberscapes called Western Fiberscapes.

Painted Desert is an asymetrical shallow depth shawl / wrap that is knit on the bias, to create a cross piece landscape with carefully placed feature mosaic patterns so that when wrapped around your shoulders or as a large wrapped cowl, the feature mosaic can be seen weaving it’s way around the folds.

If you have never worked with color before, mosaic knitting is a very easy way to add color without having to juggle 2 colors across a row at once. With this, your tension is much easier to manage and you knit only 1 color at a time. The pattern comes from slipping stitches in the previous color as you knit the second strip of color. As you can see, it creates a dramatic feature to a piece.