Take everything you know about stranded colourwork, park it to one side, and get ready for a colourwork ride in a totally new direction with textiles explorer, Liz Baltesz.  Extreme colour is an exciting all-day workshop, for experienced knitters to break open the boundaries of what you thought was possible colourwise, and increase your repertoire of colour work techniques. The workshops focus on the approaches pioneered by Kieran Foley and Xandy Peters, including stranding with intarsia and lace and stacked stitches.

The workshop will explore:

• How to choose yarn and understand how fibre, spin, and handle will affect your work
• Choosing needles for different techniques
• Choosing and mixing colour
• Stranding back and forth
• Stranding with intarsia
• Managing multiple colours
• Splicing yarn
• Using beads
• different approaches to stacked stitches
• intarsia, stranding and lace
• inspiring designers and patterns

You will work with Liz to plan your own extreme colour project – including devising the design, yarn and colour choices.

Skills needed

• Basic knowledge of stranded colour work and simple lace
• Chart reading

Materials

Patterns and yarn to play will be provided, but please bring with you:
Leftover fingering weight yarn which can be used for swatching.
A range of needles: Liz recommends needles with sharp points ranging from 2.75mm to 3.5mm.

About the teacher

Liz Baltesz has been knitting for over 50 years. She loves playing with colour and is fascinated by creating fabric and experimenting with pattern and form. Her colourwork journey began by learning to knit fairisle as a teenager. In the 1980s she discovered the bolder more experimental designs of Kaffe Fasset and her work began to draw on the relationship between textile design and patterns found in ceramics, tapestry and the built enviroment. More recently she’s been inspired by Keiran Foley’s work and the affect of complex stitches such as stacked increases and decreases on colour and texture.