Book excerpt: Explore a new approach to knitting! Knitting Outside the Swatch is an exploration of non-traditional construction techniques for creating and joining flowers, motifs, and various geometric shapes to create inventive and dimensional fabrics. Kristin Omdahl presents a library of 40 original and innovative stitch motifs and shows how joining one or more motifs can create trims or whole fabrics. She demonstrates methods for center-out, top-down, and side-to-side construction. Enjoy 10 project patterns including shawls, cowls, scarves, and sweaters. Kristin illustrates how to interchange various motifs in these patterns and encourages you to incorporate motifs into other designs. Learn how to integrate these motifs into the body of a garment and how to decorate or embellish other knitwear by using motifs as edgings, bands, cuffs, and more. Think outside the box with this must-have knitting book!