Swirls and Chevrons

First of all, the hat turned out well.

 

It even fits!

But after those smaller things, I was ready for something larger, so I've started an afghan with an interlocking chevron design, along the lines of this or this.

Here's the beginning.

 

There will be two sets of colors, one darker and one lighter.

My sister-in-law is visiting, and here's what she's working on: a log cabin type of pattern.

 

Here's her yarn.

I love her sense of color.

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.

"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.

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....