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The Walker Treasury Project

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Most knitters know that Barbara Walker’s Treasuries are indispensable. We use them constantly for designing, for help with a difficult pattern, and for pure inspiration. That’s where the Walker Treasury Project comes in.

A group of knitters have displayed on the web many of [tag]Barbara Walker[/tag]’s Treasury of Knitting stitch patterns in color. The hope is to offer knitters a visual aid when knitting these stitch patterns as the original patterns were pictured in black and white in the books and do not give justice to the true beauty of the [tag]stitch patterns[/tag]. The site will not offer the patterns, however, as they are copyrighted.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Barbara authored several volumes of knitting references. Her knitting treasury series documents over a thousand different knitting stitches. Barbara’s other books included designing [tag]mosaic knitting[/tag] to producing multicolored designs while knitting only one color per row, and ‘[tag]Knitting from the Top[/tag]” a book on how to construct knitted garments from the top-down rather than the usual bottom-up method. After over 20 years out of print, ‘Knitting from the Top‘ is being reprinted with many of her other knitting books, starting in the mid-1990s, as well as the publication of new contributions to knitting literature.

If you have the opportunity, visit The Walker Treasury and view the stitched designs. The site is very slow loading as it is graphic intense. This will be an ongoing project since there are over 1,000 patterns in the 4 book set – so visit often.

Comments

  1. Hello!

    I wasn’t aware that the page was loading slow (I’m a college student spoiled with high speed internet) – I changed the number of posts that show up and so hopefully that will mean things will load faster!

    Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

  2. Nicole, thanks for visiting. Love the pics of the stitches. Yes, some of us have slower access,LOL. I was also spoiled at college with the speed, but alas I now have a DSL connection.

    Laura

Have you read?

Knit a Log Cabin Blanket with All Your Scraps

I guess I must have had this pattern on my mind, because I had chosen this log cabin blanket recipe to write about, promptly forgot about it and a couple of weeks later started knitting a log cabin blanket using all my pink yarn. 

It might stay pink if it makes it to baby blanket sized, or I might add in some pastel green and blue, too, to make a bigger blanket. We’ll see. I’m also holding several strands of yarn together to make a kind of bulky yarn, which means it’s deeply satisfying how much yarn is used even as the project is still relatively small. 

In Kristen Finlay’s version, DK weight yarn scraps (or fingering/sock yarn held double) are used to make a simple scrappy log cabin blanket that’s lighter weight than my version. Log cabin is a great technique for knitters of any skill level because it’s worked in garter stitch. The only not completely basic technique you need for log cabin knitting is picking up stitches. 

If you’ve never worked a log cabin knitting project before, this is a good introduction, and it is really nice to use all your yarn scraps in one big project you’ll use for years to come. 

If you use a lot of DK weight yarn you can keep building on it whenever you finish a project, or if you use more worsted weight you can do the same thing with it, it will just be a little bigger starting out than the pattern calls for. How big it gets is totally up to you. 

I have really been enjoying working on my log cabin project, and it’s my current sitting at my desk and need a break knit (do you have one of those or is it just me?). 

Ready to start your own log cabin blanket knitting project? You can grab the free pattern from Kristen Finlay on Ravelry. 

Need more log cabin inspiration? Check out more log cabin knitting patterns. 

[Photo: Kristen Finlay]