Sandra's Designing Blog

Festival Finale & Rainbow Rays

Posted on 12:00pm Friday 25th Jun 2021

Festival Finale

This weekend marks the end of the WoveninKirklees festival and I've been busier than ever! Getting reasy for the yarn market, creating new kits, sewing up bunting etc etc. Hope I get to see some of you in St Georges square this weekend. Sounds like it's going to be fun!

I really enjoyed going back to Huddersfield Railway station a few days ago to help with a facebook live video. If you can spare 3/4 of an hour to watch and listen to the video it really explains the inspiration and thought process that went into the installation. You can view the video here - Exploring the Big Rainbow Knit in Huddersfield.

I was responsible for the design of the Rainbow Rays, the panels that adorn the planters in the square and the 3 bigger pieces that are on the station gate and the bus shelter. All these pieces again were made from knitted squares that were brought together in special unique designs which I created. The 2 coloured squares were used as a basis, utilising a rainbow colour and either black or white. The Big Rainbow knitters were really happy to experiment in their knitting and wanted to do more than the simple garter stitch square. As the 2 coloured squares came in to the Big Rainbow knit HQ, I starting to pull them together in to my 6 x 4 squares designs. I designed over 25 original pattern layouts, half of which were sent out to our Big Rainbow sewers to sew up!

In fact the whole Rainbow Rays idea was inspired by the blocks (a series of repeated shapes) that go on to make quilt patterns. These will be explored in the ebook, to give you ideas as to how you can use the 6 x 4 and 4 x 4 squares repeated to make interesting throws and cushions.

Pre-order the Rainbow Rays pattern eBook here

I also created a number of slips stitch and fair isle patterns that were knitted up in to squares too by our Big Rainbow knitters. The slip stitch patterns were developed to look like illusions, inspred by the Rainbow being one big illusion. The Fair isle patterns were developed to be squares or triangles within the bigger square and then when brought together they give a checkerboard effect.

If you live or travel through Kirklees you may have seen yarn bombings popping up all over the district. A few of the sites have used the same idea of utilsing the 2 coloured squares to develop their own patterns.