One of the stranded patterns for the California Revival Collection is going to be a pair of mitts (full & fingerless options) with a geometric quatrefoil pattern.

There’s a Wikipedia entry for quatrefoil.  You can see some images here, via Google.  It’s a common motif, often used in ironwork, and very prevalent in California Revival architecture and architectural details.

My first chart just incorporated the basic shape. An aside:  I use Knit Visualizer for my charts;  the blue square is a custom stitch, called Color Cobalt.  I tend to use a lot of custom stitches — this is one of the real strengths of Knit Visualizer.  I’ll do custom stitches for novel stitches as well as for normal stitches for which I want a different definition than the one pre-loaded into Knit Visualizer.  The black lines are just outlines of the stitch repeat.  This chart shows the single motif tiled.

The original motif was too large, and had too much white space (or, in knitterly terms, had too much of the main color, not enough of the contrast color).  I kept altering just the original motif — taking away columns and rows — until I got it to a size I liked.  Then I started playing with stitch patterns within the motif framework. There were many iterations before I reached one I’m going to swatch — here’s an example of one that just didn’t work out quite right, but was getting closer.

I’ll post a sample of the one I will be using as well as a swatch once I’ve done the latter.  Just because it looks okay on the chart doesn’t mean it’ll translate well to fabric, of course.

I’m going to be using the MacKintosh yarn from the ill-fated Mac Mitts (working title!).  Enjoy this pic now, because this mitt is doomed — I’m going to frog it today, get the yarn into hanks & wash it.

This was a design that just didn’t work for me.  The chart is obviously done, the pattern written up — I just didn’t like it enough.  The yarn is just gorgeous, though;  I’d been going back & forth with what to do with the yarn, and I’m glad it’s found a pattern ‘home’ in this project.