The Marl Project Part 2 - Martin and Strauss by Cecelia Campochiaro

The unique flexibility of CL Yarn - the fact that knitting weights are built from individual strands - makes our yarn particularly well-suited to marling. This characteristic was highlighted by Cecelia Campochiaro in the introduction to her magisterial book, Making Marls: A Sourcebook for Multistrand Handknitting*. Two projects in her book - Martin and Strauss - were designed specifically for CL Merino. We are privileged to have worked with Cecelia to develop the marls for these designs and are grateful for the opportunity to offer them as kits.

Martin and Strauss are both generously-sized scarves that cunningly exploit the multi-strand aspect of CL Merino to create subtly shifting marls worked in a sequence knitting stitch that further highlights their marl effect.

*Chroma Opaci Books, Sunnyvale CA, 2020; p.2. 

Martin

 

Worked with two colors, one darker and one lighter, Martin exploits what Cecelia calls a “complex gradient marl": half of the scarf stripes the darker color with gradient marls; the other half stripes the lighter color with the same gradient marls. The average color value moves from the darker to the lighter end of the scarf.

 

Strauss

 

Strauss is also worked with a darker and a lighter color, but with a different approach to marling. Cecelia describes Strauss as “an ultimate marl bridging pattern with one long span.” The scarf begins with a marl heavily weighted toward the darker color and moves incrementally to end with its opposite, a marl similarly weighted toward the lighter color.

 

The Marls

Cecelia has chosen four marl options for the kits. Along with the original high-contrast cool neutral marl featured in her book (night + porcelain), there is a low-contrast cool neutral (storm + watermark), a high-contrast warm neutral (vintage + shy), and a medium-contrast go-with-everything cool blue (bocciablu + bluenote).