One More For 2009

The year 2000 didn't affect me so much, but I was sure we'd have flying cars by 2010. Oh, well, no one promised me Google, Wikipedia and lolcats, so I got those for free.

Here it is, the last shawl of 2009, now with edging.

(That's a yardstick, just for some indication of size.) The edging added a lot, somehow.

Here are some details.

My favorite part may be the checkerboard, because it added crispness to the entire design.

The top of the shawl is based on a simple yet clever design by Frankie Brown, called Nick's Boring Scarf (ravelry link for the free pattern, although you may be able to contact Frankie through her other site and arrange something). It is a good way to mix up a color changing yarn. Here is Frankie's picture of a Noro one, used with permission.

It also works great with the patterned sock yarns, which is what I used on my shawl, and on this scarf (not a great picture, but you get the idea).

I count 17 shawls in my 2009 pictures, not counting scarves and other distractions. It's been a fun knitting year.

Blocking the Fun

Blocking does wonders. And I hate it.

I don't like to sew, which is why I'll go out of my way to knit pieces together instead of joining afterward. I just don't like sewing, even when I don't have to make tiny perfect stitches. I love quilts, love looking at quilt books, but the idea of having to make one, with even seams and equal sizes of pieces, would be torture.

Blocking with blocking wires is a lot like sewing to me, having to thread the wires through the stitches evenly, and then trying to get perfect, albeit stretched, proportions all around. I should think about putting edgings of big loops on everything, just to make the most hateful part go more quickly.

Here is the latest, being blocked before I add a fuzzy edging.

Yes, I know the bottom point is off -- one of the pins slipped during the night. It looked okay when I unpinned it, thank goodness. I love how blocking brings out the patterns and stitches, and makes the texture more fluid in general. I just hate doing it.

Here's how I block, which is sort of a modified Elizabeth Zimmerman version. I fill the washer with the hottest water on the lowest amount, and add just a tiny amount of detergent or shampoo. I let it agitate, and then add the shawl and let it agitate again until the shawl is completely immersed and swished around a bit (maybe a minute, maybe less), and then pull out the knob to stop the agitation and let it soak for at least 15 minutes. Then I put it on spin. When that's finished, I run the hot again, let it sit to get out any soap, and then spin. If the piece is heavy or otherwise not feeling dry enough, I'll spin it one final time.

Sometimes I can get away with just laying the shawl out at that point, since the hot water has relaxed it enough or I don't want to pull it out of shape. Otherwise, it's the blocking wires to stretch it to within an inch of its life.

The hot water removes any oil or sizing in the yarn, making it softer and helping to even out the stitches. The blocking can get rid of small unevennesses as well as stretch it out to get the full effect, and really does make a difference in the final drape. It's utterly magical with lace in particular, but every shawl I've made has only been improved by the process.

I still hate it.

My Christmas Gift

A finished afghan! Just what I wanted!

That means I get to work on the one I started during a trip -- I rarely have more than one going, but the tilings one wasn't easily transportable. This one is going to be far more lighthearted to knit, colors and no large patterns, so like a mental palette-cleanser.

Maybe it was finished by Santasaurus Rex?

I wish. Not the first Christmas Eve spent finishing something, probably not the last, but this is the first time it was for me.

Some Silliness for the Season

I decorated my knitting at my office.

Note Dragon Claus as well.

 

Of course, silliness doesn't end at knitting.

Have a jolly holiday.

"How Do You Have The Patience?"

I don't

I get asked this relatively frequently by people looking at my knitting. If it took patience, I probably would be doing something else. I like to do this; your mileage may vary.

Speaking of mileage, my friend Dave ran his first 50k race (about 31 miles) yesterday. He was running for just under 5 hours. Some people took over 8 hours to do the distance! Can you imagine? Just running: no music, a little conversation maybe, nothing to keep their hands busy.

How do they have the patience?

Here is how the current piece is going. I'm not sure how successful it will be in the end, but I'm on this journey, so I'll see how it ends.

Half Done is Well Begun

I finally got the bottom half done.

This one is going fairly slow -- since I'm knitting on as I go, I've had to frog a few triangles because I'd get almost done, and realize that I'd joined at the wrong pace, creating puckers. It was purely out of inattention.

I'm tired of small triangles, so I've decided to finish the top part in the larger triangles (the red triangles instead of the smaller black ones in the diagram). That will also emphasize, I hope, that each shape is the same, differing only in size -- the small black triangles are the same shape as the red triangles, which are the same shape as the entire large triangle.

See? Making the larger triangles on top isn't laziness, it's a design feature. My uncle ran a credit union, and he once said that his ideal employee was a conscientious lazy person, because the employee would always find the most efficient way to do anything. Here's to you, Uncle Frank!

I'm thinking of using something that is shaded, or has a color change, for the top triangles, but I'm going to have to look through my stash and see what I have. Any suggestions on the color family? The current triangles are all greeny, from celery through dark olives to blue-greens. (Why? Because I happened to have a lot of greens in my stash, that's why. And, um, efficiency, that's right, efficiency!)

So how many to cast on for each large triangle? You'll notice that the hypotenuse of a large triangle is made up of non-hypotenuses of the other triangles.

I know that A is twice B (from the original tiling description), and that the hypotenuse is 100 stitches long. So I went to a right triangle solver (this is the one I use) and I made a guess for sides A and B (d and e in my solver) of 80 and 40.

Not so good: a hypotenuse of 89, not 100.

So I tried 90 and 45. That gives me 100.6, which is essentially perfect, given that knitting is forgiving.

Were you surprised that side A (90 stitches) was so close to 100? I was. Now all I need is the yarn.

Color As the Fifth Dimension

I went to St. Johns in Annapolis, where one spends a lot of time in the first math class discussing what a geometric point really means. I heard someone on the phone the next year saying, "I just want to yell, it's a dot, damn it, can't we get on with this?"

First dimension, visualized as a dot. 

Second dimension, visualized as a straight line.

Third dimension, visualized as a coil.

Fourth dimension (time), visualized as a point moving in a coil pattern, so if you froze it, you'd only see one part or another.

And then my own private fifth dimension, color, visualized as a point moving in a coil pattern, also changing color as it goes.

Color changes everything.

Here is an example, using the Curve of Pursuit pattern from Woolly Thoughts. (Love their stuff, which I tend to use as the outline for my palette.) (Pictures used with permission.)

Version 1, by VelvetMarmoset on Ravelry. Note how the colors make you group several sections together.

Here is a second version, by Nettischaf in Ravelry (her blog)

Note how she has made the corners not match, too. 

  
The third is by Mawelucky on Ravelry. (her blog)  Wow, doesn't that look different? All done by color choices -- she used all four colors in every layer, instead of using one color per layer.

As for me, well, I don't keep my focus so well, so I put in several curves in one afghan.

 

Same shape in each one, but what a difference that dimension brings!

When Triangles Go Wrong

Okay, these weren't exactly triangles, but they were almost triangles (one side was curved).

I knit the middle section of this afghan first, thinking the final result would be circular like the Spinning a Yarn pattern from Woolly Thoughts I was using (and adding colors to). Then, once I was well into the spiral and grasped how the pattern worked, I wanted more excitement, and the idea of using the spiral as a middle motif was born. So I knit 4 smaller side pieces, and then I had to knit the roughly triangular shapes around the center spiral to square it out so I could join it all together.

Numbers are my friends, so how hard could that be? Hard enough that part of the back of this project looks like this:

And this:

 

 

Yes, those are flaps of knitting. What seemed like a simple task of knitting triangles with curved sections turned into a nightmare.

The first problem was that this was a spiral, not a circle, so the curves weren't regular. Each time I thought I had done the math, and each time I was sadly mistaken. I tried curves based on two circles, I tried curves based on ovals, I tried hardcore measuring.

 

Two of the triangles I managed to fudge, and two of them, well, you see the flaps on the back. I never did get the formula absolutely correct, even after a lot of work on spreadsheets. I suspect it was me more than the math, that I just translated what the spreadsheets were showing me poorly, but, well, I'll never know.

Sometimes you just get it wrong.

How To Know When a Craft is Right For You

My quick answer is, when you don't mind the 'chores' very much. I used to paint, but I didn't like setting the palette and cleaning up. In comparison, I actually rather like untangling yarn.

There are the positives of why knitting works for me, of course, which essentially are how knitting fits my personality and the tempo of my life. I very much like being able to pick up my knitting at any moment I'm home and knit for a few stitches, or for a few hours. I like being able to put it down at any moment, and I like that I can work on it during trips. I like that it offers so much variety: I can do cables, lace, colorwork, entrelac, socks, blankets, circles, mosaics. I can start one kind of thing and it can grow. I like the flexibility -- my 'conditional knitting.' I love that I can do designs that require me to look at what I'm knitting, but not requiring me to follow a pattern, and that I can do all sorts of things with color, but I'm not forced to use multistranded layers.

And I love the wonderful yarn that is currently available. When I started knitting seriously, about 15 or so years ago, multicolored yarn was rare, and Noro hadn't shown up yet.

Knitting as a craft is right for me. Here is proof from back in my early days, when my head was full of Kaffe Fassett and his knitting designs.

Each cable is made up of two colors, with 4 stitches between each cable. The colors shaded in the cables from the outside to the middle, and so did the stitches between the cables. I count 44 different colors, and at the top, there were something like 84 separate balls hanging from the knitting as I worked across. The colors changed every 4 stitches, too, for the entire piece.

It took forever to put the colors in the proper sequences, then to make the small balls to knit from, and then to disentangle at regular intervals. I started from the bottom point, so I could learn to manage it as it grew.

Eighty-four balls which had to be changed every 4 stitches; and I didn't mind a bit. If that doesn't prove that knitting is right for me, then nothing will.

When Triangles Go Right

Some triangles are harder to knit than others. Here is how to tame them.

All triangles can be divided into two right triangles. If you put the longest side on the bottom, and drop a line straight down from the peak, you have divided the original triangle into two right triangles.

 
(If two sides of the original are equal to each other, pick either one. If all three sides are equal, pick any of them.)

Not being a sweater knitter, this is the one time I pay attention to gauge. If you are using garter stitch, then your gauge (horizontal) is equal to your row gauge (vertical); specifically, one stitch is equal to one ridge (two rows). You can think of each part as a small square, and can graph out shapes easily on regular graph paper.

If you are using stockinette stitch, it's trickier. I generally measure, but it is roughly a 4:3 ratio (4 stitches = 3 rows, because each stitch is taller than it is wide). This is why there is special knitter's graph paper which you can use to chart out stockinette patterns. If you are using some other stitch, then you have to measure to get your gauge and row gauge.

Using your gauge, figure out how many stitches you need for line A, and then using your row gauge, figure out how many rows you need for line C. Now you know how long you have in which to decrease down to zero from line A. For a super simple example, if A = 20 stitches and C = 10 rows, you have to decrease 20 stitches in 10 rows, so you have to decrease 2 stitches in each row.

Now do the other side. If B = 5 stitches, then you have to decrease 5 stitches in 10 rows, or 1 stitch every other row.

Now you can knit the entire triangle. Cast on A+B stitches (20 + 5 in the example), and then on the right edge, decrease one stitch every other row, and on the left edge, decrease 2 stitches each row, as you go back and forth. That will give you a triangle of the shape you wanted.

Pinwheel Aperiodic Tiling

This is what I'm working on right now. The contrast in the photo isn't quite right -- it is all shades of green, but I can't figure out how to edit the image so the colors are more true to life.

I was looking at pictures of various tilings on this webpage and found the pinwheel one near the bottom of the page. What caught my eye was:

The pinwheel tiling can be constructed by starting with a right angle triangle with side lengths of 1, 2 and square root of 5.

In other words, it's made of right triangles where one side is twice as long as the other side -- an extremely simple shape to knit in garter stitch. I liked the random ('aperiodic') look a lot, and if it is flipped over, one could make a rectangle.


Each segment has 5 parts, so I got out all my greens and put them in groups of 5 of similar hues, and got started. I decided on sides of 20 and 40 stitches-- you can see that the length of the entire shape is the equivalent of 5 'long sides,' so my entire length would be 200 stitches. I'm on my fourth segment, knitting each piece on as I go.

If you start a triangle from the 40 stitch side, decrease one stitch on each row at the slope side; if you start from the 20 side, decrease every other ridge (once every 4th row).

I had thought I'd make the top side in a similar fashion but in a contrasting color, bur I'm getting bored of one-color garter. I may make the top where each segment is all one piece, in some kind of shaded yarn.

Imagine how this would look done in Noro yarn....

Why isn't it Unconditional Knitting?

For me, the joy of knitting is in the reacting. Like conditional probabilities in statistics, what happens next in my knitting depends on what has already happened. Surprises abound, because even when I think I know how the finished product will look, randomness has a way of sneaking in.

That's where the thrill is.