The Curiosity Door

Updated: Sep 15, 2022

Pattern available on Ravelry and Etsy.

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to walk through a doorway and find another world on the other side?

Woman in black shirt appearing out from behind a multi-colored striped scarf like a curtain, as if emerging through a door to another world.

One of my favorite meditations is to close my eyes and imagine walking down a spiral staircase from my head down past the windows of my eyes all the way down deep into the center of my being until I find a door that opens onto a meadow with a path that leads into a magical wooded grove. It's where my creative spirit lives.

Now, I'm certainly sure that a playdate with his creative spirit is NOT what Dustin was thinking of when he shouted about the curiosity door in Stranger Things, BUT! Whether it's science or color choices or indeed just about anything in life, I do agree that we should never stop being curious!

(Here's a link to that clip in the show: https://youtu.be/vvSOyy7rnvI)

And so that is how I approached this design. With curiosity and wonder. I had an intriguing selection of 13 different colorways from Teal Torch Knits, all inspired by Stranger Things, but not necessarily what immediately appeared to be a cohesive set. And so I played with them.

13 mini skeins of yarn in various mostly variegated colorways from Teal Torch Knits along with a stitch marker from DKGraham and Stranger Things themed stickers

I laid them all out in the order I received them and then I started shuffling them around. I took a picture and de-saturated it (or you can look for a grayscale filter on your phone) to see the values of dark and light colors - sometimes this will surprise you! It's a trick I highly recommend.

Even once I had decided on an order, though, I wasn't married to it! I changed my mind at least once mid-way through, once I saw how the colors were working up within the panels of stitch sequences. And, as I mention in the pattern, if I were to do this same project all over again, I would probably choose a different order!

A partially finished striped scarf laid out alongside unwound hanks of remaining yarn to imagine future color changes.

The point was that I remained open to change. I stayed curious. I embraced the joy of simply allowing the colors to take me on a journey, remembering moments from the show they were inspired by as I came to each new colorway name, seeing how they interacted with one another and not being afraid to switch things up if I didn't like how two colors played alongside one another!

So I invite you to join me on a color journey through a doorway to curious things! This design makes a great stashbuster project, as you can see in some of the fabulous pictures in my pattern tester gallery below. But it's also beautiful in a curated set of colors, of course. It would also be a perfect staple accessory worked up in your favorite solid or tonal neutral!