Bloops in Triangles

I continue the exploration of Planet Bloop.

(This shows the shawl hanging in my office.)

My exploration was whether bloops would work with increases. I think it was a success.

It was knit vertically, increasing one stitch at the beginning of each ridge, and leaving a tail at the beginning and end to make the fringe. (I knotted them together as I went along.) When it seemed long enough, I began decreasing at the beginning of each row instead.

The first few ridges were done plain, and then I started a small bloop sequence with a plain row in between the bloop rows. The part that worried me was the end bloops: what would happen as the rows increased, and then decreased? How do the bloops work there?

What I ended up doing was saving the bloop nearest to the edge until the end of each sequence on the increase side, and making it the first bloop in the sequence on the decrease side, just to be sure it was accounted for. In retrospect I don't know for sure if I needed to do that, but it worked well enough.

However, on the increase side I did learn to make the bloop next to the final edge one as early as possible, because as the edge grew, it was easy to end up having to finish a sequence with a lot of bloops next to each other, which didn't help the random look I was after. On the decrease side, I had to be careful to make the ones near the top early on.

The pictures don't show it very clearly, but the top edge is again the ruffle yarn.

#12 for 2011 -- Focus

Yes, back to triangles.

More symmetrical this time, and nice bright, clear colors. Here are some closer looks.

All in all, very jolly!

Graphic

Here's my plan:

 (A closer look)

 This tells me how big each rectangle is -- the numbers are the number of ridges each way. I don't know that I'll knit the entire graph. The green segment is the one I'm currently knitting.

Each rectangle is being knit as two triangles, knit in different directions, knit from different colorways.

The colorways allow themselves to be divided into the lighter and darker groups, so I alternate those as well.

One other variation that's emerged is that I'm doing one colorway by alternating two colors, and the other colorway knitting two ridges of each color. I love how these sorts of details emerge -- that's the heart of conditional knitting.

Ninth 2010 One Done

Here it is, Organic Triangles:

I like it, but not as crazy-looking as I'd hoped, based on the initial inspiration.

Here are some closer views of each corner.

It does look a little melty, at least.

And I'm already off on the next one, based on a Frank Lloyd Wright window, but a quick google image search didn't show the right one, so I'm going to have to find it before the next post.

Log cabin triangles, good-by for now, and thanks for the mental entertainment!

Knit, Purl, Or Get Out Of The Way

Here is my organic progress.

It's starting to look a little more organic. I like the emerging hand-drawn look.

Here is one of the edges.

You can see the how the stripes are starting to look wavy, due to short rows. The blue markers are to help me track how far out I am from the middle, to keep it roughly symmetrical.

Here's another look.

This gives you a better view of the stripes I've added on the left. I'm starting to play with the colors more, which keeps it interesting to knit. I like the idea of having it appear more organized in the middle, and then getting wilder towards the edges.

Triangles Go Organic

I was going to do something with more integrated colors for a change, instead of segments or modules, but then I saw this piece by knittinweaver on Ravelry: (used with permission)

She is calling it 'Log Cabin Goes Organic.' For those on Ravelty, here's the direct link.

She started a regular log cabin, and then

Okay, anybody who knows me, knows I usually have the attention span of a 5 year old. I just couldn’t see me making more rectangles the same, so I decided to go organic.

Maybe she's my long-lost twin.

She is using short-rows, and just doing a lot of on-the-fly estimating, or, in my terms, conditional knitting.

Well, I had wanted to make a triangular shawl all out of log cabin triangles anyway, since I've been on a log cabin triangle spree, so I couldn't resist trying this. Integrated colors can wait.

Here is my progress so far, with a shoe added for an idea of size.

Like knittinweaver, I usually bind off at each segment, but mostly because I don't care for the needles flapping around. But this time, since with a triangle they are more out of the way, I'm not binding off. This also means I don't have to pick up along the entire segment, which is a time and patience saver. So far it is working out well. 

Here's a closer look at the center

I was adding short rows at different points in a segment, but they didn't seem to show much, so now I'm adding 3 extra rows on one end each time. That has helped, but it doesn't get to the truly organic look yet.

So I went back to the source. Here's a closer look at knittinweaver's piece:

Over and above the fact that she's been more daring than me, I see that she has emphasized the short-rows by making up for them on the first rows of the new color, for a more sudden effect than my middle short-rows.  And finally, she's now adding stripes to really emphasize the shape.

I'm trying for a sort of wavy but roughly symmetrical look, so I'm reluctant to really go wild with the short-rows, but these tips will help me inch closer to the look I'm hoping for.

And then again, maybe my attention-span will run out, and I'll go just as crazy. Oh, the joy of knitting adventure!

And speaking of adventure, here is exactly how much ribbon yarn was left at the end of this one segment.

It made for some nervousness towards the end, but don't you just love it when there is exactly enough?

Eighth 2010 One Finished

Here it is, Log Cabin Triangles, with the final edging. That's a yardstick, for size.

It's a heavy afghan, but not unduly so. Here are some detail pictures.

Here is a close-up of the edging -- the final outside yarn matches the middle of the triangles. Note the different sizes, because of the extra row I put at the top and bottom for a little extra overall width.

My husband said wistfully, "Maybe one day you'll make something symmetrical." His sense of design yearned for the colors to be in the same position in all four quadrants. He's a woodworker, and matching perfectly tends to be a goal.

I had to tell him, "I don't think so. Imagine how boring it would be for your eyes, nothing to tantalize them or to explore!" That's my sense of design. I also get too impatient for the next thing to enjoy making identical pieces.

And, as is fairly common with me, this gives me some future ideas. Here is how the diamonds look vertically, instead of horizontally.

And the angles made think of doing a sort of mountain theme, with the diagonal strips for the mountains, and then shades of blue for a sky? (I put some dotted lines for where the mountain shapes might be.)

Three Quadrants Done

Progress, and, um, the design is looking a little busy.

It appears a little more organized in real life, but because the stripes and the diamonds are in the same colors, you don't get a foreground-background effect. The colors come across as very summery -- very warm.

It turned out not to be difficult to make the quadrants which start from the middle diamond. Here is how it looked just before joining the small diamond.

Here is how that part looks now.

When I got to the part where I needed to join the smaller diamond, here is what I did.

When I finished stripe #1, I didn't cut the yarn. When I started stripe #2, I carried yarn #1 down the back until I got 16 stitches in. Then I dropped yarn #2, and did a double bind-off between the rest of stripe #1 and the diamond until I got to the point.

Then I cut yarn #1, picked up yarn #2 and continued on my merry way.

Fairly easy, actually. So much for yarn trepidation.

First Quadrant Done

My friend Sandy came up with a modification to my original idea -- she suggested positioning the background stripes as if radiating out of the central diamond. Here is the preliminary result.

I think it turned out well so far. Here are some close-ups.

It look me one false start, but here is how I made this quandrant.

I picked up 40 stitches along 'd' just along the edge, not with yarn, in the same proportions as for making the triangles.

I started at 'a' by knitting two stitches into the first stitch, knit back. Then knit twice into the first stitch, knit the next stitch together with the next picked-up stitch, knit back. After that, each right side row was: knit two into the first stitch, knit across, knit the last stitch together with the next picked up stitch.

Each stripe was 5 ridges wide. I had also picked up along the side of the large diamond and knew that was 55 stitches, which told me that I needed to have 15 stitches above the point of the smaller diamond (plus one edge stitch, created when I knit two stitches at the beginning instead of one). This told me when to turn the corner from A to B -- when decreasing one stitch each ridge after the turn would leave me with 15 + 1 stitches at the top of the diamond. This worked out to be in the middle of the sixth stripe, where after the third ridge, I started knitting two together on the first stitch (decreasing one instead of increasing).

For how I did C, let's move to the next diagram.

After reaching the tip of the small diamond, on the next stripe I picked up 40 along the 'f' side of the diamond, and then knit the last stitch together with the first stitch picked up from the side of the large diamond (side 'e').  Then I continued in the same fashion as before, decreasing one on the first stitch, knitting the last stitch together with one from large diamond along side 'e' until I had decreased them all away.

I can use this same method for the bottom left quadrant of the afghan, but I'm going to have to mirror the progression for the other two sides, starting from the tip of the large diamond instead of ending there. Otherwise, I will have the wrong side of the ridges on the front, which won't give me clean joins.

That won't be so much fun, because it means casting off along the side of the small diamond instead of picking up. In our next installment, I'll tell you how that goes.

Log Cabin Triangles

Okay, time to fulfill my promise. Here is how to do log cabin-style triangles.
This is the middle, as previously shown.
 

Here is a marked-up version.

All in garter stitch.

The center triangle: cast on 21, and then decrease one stitch at the beginning of each row (decreasing one stitch on each side for each ridge), until down to 3 stitches, and then knit through all 3 and bind off. This makes a triangle with 45 degrees angles at the bottom, and a 90 degree angle at the top.

Section A: Pick up along one side of the triangle, picking up 7 stitches for each 5 ridges. Knit back and forth, increasing one stitch in each ridge on the side towards the bottom (hypotenuse) of the triangle. (I increased one on the right side, then just knit back for each ridge.)

(I'm traveling, so I don't have this in front of me, but I'm guessing I did ten ridges? it doesn't really matter, pick whatever looks good to you.)

Section B: Pick up along the side of section A, picking up one stitch for each ridge, and then down the side of the triangle, picking up 7 stitches for each 5 ridges. Knit the same way as A, increasing one stitch in each ridge on the hypotenuse side.

Section C: Pick up one stitch for each ridge along the side of Section B, pick up along the bottom of the triangle, stitch for stitch, and then pick up one stitch for each ridge along the side of Section A. Increase one stitch on both sides for each ridge.

This creates a piece with the same angles, 45 -45- 90. You could keep going like this, around and around, and then make another piece the same way, and put them together along the hypotenuse to make a square.

That isn't what I did. Here is how mine now looks.

And here's a closer look. You can see that I made one more layer around the middle before turning it into the top middle of what will be a triangular shawl.