How to Use a Frill

About the only thing you see the frilly yarns used for are the scarves that are all frill. But those yarns are so full of possibilities!

Here are some other uses.

 1. Beginnings

Easiest cast-on in the book: just pick up along the frill. Casting off is a bit harder, but not difficult. What I usually do is cast off with another yarn, picking up a bit of the frilly yarn in each stitch cast off.

2. Down the Middle

The pink one is a bit of fun, frilly and shiny and lacy. I did one of the frilly yarns down the middle, one ridge forward and back. This gives a lovely frill down the middle on both sides.

Here are a few closer looks.

 I really like this one!

The brown one uses the frilly yarn as the center section. I laid the frill yarn out, had it do a U-turn and then joined it down the middle to get the width, and then I knit around and around, and finished with the same frill yarn.

3. Round and Round

This is based on Kim Salazar's Kureopatora scarf, which is one of my go-to patterns. In between each section I knit one row of a frilly yarn (so the frill was on one side), and then started the next section. This makes the frill wrap around the scarf.

It's difficult to get a good picture of the effect, so I tried to show it with the lines below.

Here is a blue version, maybe you can see the wraparound here, too.

 It's a start. I think there are still more things to discover.

Why Not?

I'm entranced with Circulo Tecido Trico, a fabric strip yarn with holes along one side. I'll post pictures of how I used it in a scarf soon. I also love Darn Good Yarn's fabric yarns.

So I thought I would try to make some myself.

I bought some remnants and some wide ribbons which were on sale, looking for materials that didn't seem like they would fray if cut.

Before:

During:

After:

How easy, right?

Well, except for needing to buy a new rotary blade and choosing the wrong one, making cuts into my cutting board, and, because I couldn't resist the glittery materials, I ended up with glitter everywhere. (I thought the glitter was part of the material, not something that would shed.)

So I ended up throwing away the most glittery ones, but after all the work cutting it, it was a disappointment.

I did end up with some yarn, but much of it feels stiffer than it did as a remnant. I'll try it, and hope the blocking softens it.

But I think I'll leave it to the professionals in the future.

Even though I did have help. Dex is glittery now, too.

Start-in-the-Middle Scarves

I've been playing around with an idea which got started from the super-easy cast-on of picking up along the side of one of the new ruffle yarns. What if you could pick up from both sides of the ruffle yarn?

But most of those yarns are made so each side is different, and that was going to take some thought. In the meantime, I looked through my stash and found this.

Using one of my magic balls of yarn, I picked up every other loop on one side with a size 11 needle, and then picked up the remaining loops on the other side with another size 11 needle, placing two markers at each end. Then I just continued knitting one entire round, and then purling the next so I had a garter effect, and continued in this fashion until it was wide enough.

At each end, I increased on either side of the markers on each knit round, which is what squared off the ends.

Here's one more look at the center. By picking up every other loop, it ended up looking like a bit of lace in the middle.

All in all, a success! And this made me brave.

So I went to JoAnn's (a craft and fabric store) looking for some lace to use the same way. I found this.

I took another magic ball, this one from all whites and beiges, and made another scarf the same way.

I rounded off the ends of this one instead of squaring them by adding 4 stitches roughly evenly spaced between the end markers on each knit round.

Here are some other looks, although note that I haven't blocked this one yet.

Another success. 

I think of the yarn at JoAnn's as being on the cheap and less interesting side, so I was astonished at how beautiful much of it was--my, how yarn choices have grown! I bought these while I was there.

And these inspired me to return to my original idea, and begin in the center with the ruffle yarn. I solved the sides-not-matching issue by doubling it and then using the other yarn to crochet a join up the middle, before picking up and starting around and around the sides. 

Here's the result.

I tried to match the ruffle yarn in the middle so that the same shade was on either side of the join. The middle was unexpectantly large, so I only had to knit a few rounds (using the rounded corners again) before casting off, pulling in some of the same ruffle yarn in each cast-off stitch.

It looks very glamorous in real life. Here are some closer pictures.

I'm very pleased with all the scarves, and they couldn't be easier to make. I'm going to have to try a few more variations.

Oh, and those glimpses of tabby tails? They belong to him.

The inspector.

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.

Conditional Blocking

We have a new member of the household, by the name of Dex.

He's very helpful.

Too helpful. So what was I going to do when I needed to block some new creations?

In thinking about it, I realized that I usually wanted more width than length, or you could say, I was always more concerned with stretch one way rather than both ways.

So I really only needed gravity!

Here's what I did for a shawl:

For a large triangular shawl:

For a scarf:

For another scarf, which I put in front of the first one:

I threaded the pieces on blocking wires and then hung those wires across furniture knobs, the hooks on the shower, and similar places.

And all out of reach of the Tabinator.

It worked pretty well, as you've seen in other posts, but it wouldn't work for lace, for example, where you need to stretch it in all directions to bring out the beauty.