Suzane Smith sent over the ink to her post 25 Best Places to Find Knitting Patterns Online to share with the community, and we're glad she did. If you like to nod your head to the knitting beat then you might want to check it out. And even if you're a non-knitter there is plenty of color inspiration to be found in the yarns and patterns on these sites.

Below is a selection of sites and descriptions picked from her list. You can see the complete list and reviews here.

Few online communities are as welcoming and open to beginners as those devoted to the ancient craft of knitting. In order to promote an appreciation and love of the utilitarian art, they provide thousands of free patterns for personal, charitable, and occasionally commercial use. Ranging in skill level from the very basic to the masterful, they all provide an excellent service for those seeking to personally craft their own wardrobe and home, give a highly personal gift, or donate to a beloved charity.

Ravelry

raverly.com

Ravely easily exists as the most bustling knitting community on the internet, where hobbyists and professionals alike gather to share their projects and experiences, show off their yarn stash, and – of course – post knitting and crochet patterns. Every skill level of every possible project imaginable can be found on the 500 pages dedicated solely to completely free instructions. Even more are available directly from the designers for a fee. Smaller special interest groups have sprung up within the larger site as well, making it even easier to look for patterns conforming to highly specific needs and interests.

Plenty of color inspiration even for non-knitters, as you can see from the winners of Ravelry's Dye For Glory Competition.

Anna Hrachovec is a New York based knit toy designer. Her knitting patterns and one-off pieces can be found at her website Mochimochi Land.

The toys that inhabit Mochimochi Land are at once cute and strange, and they appeal to adults and children alike. They are all original designs by Anna Hrachovec, a knitter who lives in New York. Anna finds inspiration in Japanese kawaii culture and illustrators like Dr. Seuss.

The Mochimochi Shop specializes in downloadable knitting patterns, but one-off toys might pop up in there from time to time, too.

Batik is the process of creating intricate patterns on textiles with wax-resistant dyes. There seems to be some controversy surrounding the origins of the technique but according to the Wikipedia article discoveries showed it already exists in the Middle East, India and Central Asia over 2000 years ago. In Java, Indonesia, batik predates written records, but some experts argue that the technique might have been introduced during the 6th or 7th century from India.

Traditional colours include indigo, dark brown, and white which represent the three major Hindu Gods (Brahmā, Visnu, and Śiva). The colors of pesisir batik, from the coastal cities of northern Java, are especially vibrant, and it absorbs influence from the Javanese, Chinese and Dutch culture.

MartijnL CC-BY-SA-license

Contemporary batik, while owing much to the past, is markedly different from the more traditional and formal styles. For example, the artist may use etching, discharge dyeing, stencils, different tools for waxing and dyeing, wax recipes with different resist values and work with silk, cotton, wool, leather, paper or even wood and ceramics.

manoukrijper

A Thangka is a painted or embroidered Buddhist banner which is hung in a monastery or a family altar and occasionally carried by monks in ceremonial processions. It first became popular among traveling monks because the scroll paintings were easily rolled and transported from monastery to monastery.

Thangka, when created properly, perform several different functions. Images of deities can be used as teaching tools when depicting the life (or lives) of the Buddha, describing historical events concerning important Lamas, or retelling myths associated with other deities. Devotional images act as the centerpiece during a ritual or ceremony and are often used as mediums through which one can offer prayers or make requests. Overall, and perhaps most importantly, religious art is used as a meditation tool to help bring one further down the path to enlightenment. The Buddhist Vajrayana practitioner uses the image as a guide, by visualizing “themselves as being that deity, thereby internalizing the Buddha qualities (Lipton, Ragnubs).”

Process

Painted Thangkas are done on cotton canvas or silk with water soluble pigments, both mineral and organic, tempered with a herb and glue solution - in Western terminology, a distemper technique. The entire process demands great mastery over the drawing and perfect understanding of iconometric principles.

While maybe not as colorful as our Rainbow Cake from last week, here is a collection of impressive designer cakes.

the-icing-on-the-cake & megpi

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This is guest post from Aleta Meadowlark from the deliciously written food blog Omnomicon. She was nice enough to let us share this post with the community. Make sure to visit the original post: here, for the recipe and all the images of this most colorful rainbow cake.

So I did mention something about health and/or diet food in my last post, and while this recipe is the latter, it is most certainly not to be confused with the former. The cool thing is that if you’re making something so distractingly colourful, people will think it’s delicious no matter what.

This presents me with the option to use an old Weight Watchers trick—the one-point cupcake. Except I’m making a cake and I created my own frosting. Kinda. I’ve seen it done before, but I swear I made it up first!

This cake is suitable for many occasions:

• A child’s birthday
• Your mom’s birthday
• Coming out to your conservative parents
  • If you’re a lesbian, they’ll be thrilled that you won’t be forgoing your feminine kitchen duties.
  • If you’re the kind of gay dude who makes cakes for your parents, they were probably on to you anyway.
• Coming out to your conservative parents on your mother’s birthday
• Your friend’s jam band CD release party

. . . so I’m sure you’ll find a use for this recipe soon.

"Through abstract form, luminous surface and subtle color blends, my artwork functions as a touchstone to the pleasures and mysteries of nature."

Using a technique she calls 'crazed acrylic,' "a subtle combination of polymer clay with acrylic paints which results in shimmering colorful surfaces," Elise Winters creates beautiful organic shaped jewelery in colors of subtle vibrancy. If they remind you of budding plants or reflections off a rippling stream, then she has "done her job," as she says about the inspiration behind much of her work. Her work also reminds me of corals with palettes of the most colorful creatures from the ocean deeps.

About the Artist

The folks over at worldlabel.com had an idea to create an easy way for people to create their own cd and address labels using palettes geometric patterns and color palettes, and asked the members here at COLOURlovers to contribute designs for an exhibition. Here's what they had to say about worldlabels.com and the COLOURlovers Exhibition:

This whole exhibition idea started when one of the employees at Worldlabel.com a manufacture of blank laser and inkjet printer labels started using a colour palette to design geometric patterns.

We took these design and created a label template so folks could personalize and print. It looked great, we thought an exhibition would be a great idea, so we asked on the COLOURlovers forum if anyone would want to contribute designs for an exhibition and received several contributions. Lyell Rodieck, GreenMyEyes, submitted over 50 designs. The result of this collaborative effort is an online exhibition of CD and address label templates which can be personalized, and downloaded for free on display at WorldLabel.com.

Deciding on a favorite to download is the hardest part to getting started. Once you decide, click the template you want to download. The templates are created in Open document Format (ODF) and are easily viewed by any of these office suites: OpenOffice.org, Koffice, Staroffice IBM Lotus Symphony, or any other office suite supporting the OpenDocument format. WordPerfect Office X4 has native ODF support.

Our friends over at the handmade goods community DaWanda were kind of enough to ask me to curate a selection of colorful products for a feature on their site. Here it is reposted below. To check out the original click here.

COLOURlovers is a website dedicated to colours! COLOURlovers is an amazing resource that monitors and influences color trends. In particular, the COLOURlovers blog written by David Sommers showcases the different fascinations with colour - from current trends to website colour themes, postage stamps, art work or colour through the decades and lots more!

You can leave a comment for David here!

Click on the image for the link.

Pewpabic Pottery is a U.S. National Historical Landmark still in operation today much like it was when it was founded in 1903. The studio and school continues its long history of creating pottery and tiles with the iridescent glazes that made them famous, which are like an oil slick with an incredible translucent quality and a phantasmagoric depth of color. The works of Mary Chase Perry Stratton and Horace James Caulkins, the two responsible for the studio's start, can be seen in collections all over the world from the Louvre to the Detroit Insitute of Arts, and their architectural pieces are in many prominent spots like Herald Square in New York City and Shedd's Aquarium in Chicago.

The History

An integral part in Detroit's contribution to the Arts & Crafts movement in America. The Pottery's first home was a stable on Alfred Street in Detroit. Four years later, Pewabic Pottery moved to a new facility on East Jefferson designed by architect William Buck Stratton in the Tudor Revival style. In 1991, the building (which still houses the Pottery) and its contents were designated a National Historic Landmark and today is Michigan's only historic pottery.