Not So Interested

I have to admit, I'm starting to get bogged down. Once I pick up the current piece, I can keep working on it, but it isn't exciting me any longer.

I think it is just that I've solved the technical issues, and I prefer to be more involved as I knit -- that's what Conditional Knitting is all about! It also isn't a very quick knit, so I'm losing knitting time that could be more rewarding.

I'm thinking that I will just square this piece off, and then figure out a way to finish it off as an afghan, so I can move on.

One closer look.

Let's move to a happier topic.

Here's another trio from my trip to past. Once upon a time, I did try to knit some garments. Here is a trio of dresses, the first for an American Girl doll, and the next two for actual American Girls.

I'll end with the above note of pure cuteness!

Mandelbrot, Knitting and Everything

Benoit Mandelbrot, the 'father of fractals,' is dead.

As good as he was at math and geometry, his true gift was for seeing. He saw connections between widely scattered ideas, and saw deeper meaning where others saw mere curiosities.

The nature of fractals, where the same formula applied over and over creates a greater whole, gives insight into many parts of nature, but I want to talk about a simple one: sea shells. Think of a clam shells, which has a simple curve and a simple widening as it grows. If you change the rate of curve, so it curves just a little more, you can end up with a snail shell. If you angle the curve just a bit, you get a conch.

sea shells

And yet, it's all variations on what is in fact a simple process. A curve is just slightly more cells on one side, or one part, than another, so all it is, is a selective speeding up a bit. Widening is making two where there was once one.

Knitting helped me understand this. Simple patterns can be made by changing just one element, but doing it over and over. Change one bit of the pattern, change where a yarnover is in relation to a decrease, and you can change waves into zigzags. Small changes can have large effects.

For example, these two types of scarves are knit exactly the same, except one is in garter and one is in ribbing.

The only difference is in whether one knits all the time, or knits and purls all the time. 

To round out the theme of math, art and nature, the following link is to a TED talk which has a presentation of the crocheted reef you may have seen around the web, as well as an explanation of how fiber arts can be excellent echoes of nature -- in this case, hyperbolic space.

 http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_wertheim_crochets_the_coral_reef.html

Enjoy the show, and next time you see an equation, think of it as just another knitting pattern.

Swirling Around

Current progress:

The piece is growing, and I've started to make the strips wider.

It makes me think of hurricanes.

The funny thing is that I reversed the pattern from the picture I was using as inspiration, so I've had to scan and flip it. I find that I do that fairly often, mirror-image the pattern. I'm not sure why that is, but perhaps it is due to the nature of knitting: I look at the pattern left-to-right, but my knitting is made right-to-left.

Proof that I'm a little backwards?

Taking a Break

planes been framed!
Originally uploaded by xfreshbatteryx

I saw the plane on Knithacker and loved the way the stitches bring out the shape. I'm thinking there should be a way to make it an embeddable motif in a flat piece as well.

I've been taking a short break from my knitting to wind some more magic balls. It's amazing how many balls can be made out of what seems like not a lot of yarn.

So: I gather a lot of odds and ends from my knitting, and when they reach a critical mass, I make magic balls, and when they reach a critical mass, I knit something out of them, and when the amount of fun yarn I have reaches a deficit, I buy more, which, when knitted, produces odd and ends, etc., etc.

It's the circle of knitting life.

Here's current progress:

It's wider top to bottom than I thought it would be at this point (which is fairly common for me, I have to admit). I could just add another row of the light segments and be done with it, and have a rectangular afghan, or I might continue with the original plan and have more of a square.

Fortunately, I don't even have to decide until I add the row of light segments, since that fits both plans. I may want to keep going into a square simply because when one is knitting in solid segments (as opposed to using something like Noro, which transitions), the more complexity in the final piece, the better.

We'll find out together.

When You Stare Long Enough Into Your Knitting

...It stares back into you. (Nietzsche is Pietzsche)

My knitting inevitably reflects my personality. It shows that I can apply myself to one thing for long periods of time, and that I can be detail oriented.

 

But once it is over, it is over and I need to do something completely different.

I'm not the most thorough planner, but I'm great at improvisation and making it work.

I'm more interested in the idea than perfection, and I like complexity and surprises.

(from the front)

(from the side)

And I love color! For me, that's what makes texture interesting.

And that is my knitting palmistry. Most crafts are blabbermouths. The best we can do is limit the TMI..

"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.

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!

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.