New Start

I have some waiting room time lined up in the next couple of weeks, so I wanted something non-experimental -- something I didn't have to put down and look at and measure, like the circular entrelac would have required.

I am doing a triangular shawl, started from the top middle, and I did at least start with entrelac.

Closer view:

The dark line at the two sides is the next row--I will knit back and forth around the two sides to get the steadily increasing triangle. I'm thinking this one will be mostly stockinette stitch, since I've done so much garter lately. Garter has the lovely squareish symmetry that I've counted on, but stockinette shows off the yarn so nicely.

To get a right-angled point, which I think looks best on a triangular shawl, in stockinette you increase on every two out of three rows. Since I am primarily knitting back and forth and it's a little easier to increase on the front side, I usually do this by increasing on both front and back on the first two rows, and then on the front only for the next 4 rows. So, for a six-row set of Front (F) Back (B), F B F B, it is Increase, increase, increase, plain, increase, plain. So I increase on 4 out of 6 rows.

For this particular shape, I increase at the top left and top right, and then on either side of the bottom point, so 4 increases in an increase row.

Done and Done -- Intertwined

Finally finished the first project of the New Year. I'm calling it Intertwined.

(That's a yardstick at the top, to show size.)

I have to say, it turned out nicer than I feared. I can never get the photos quite true to the real colors, but they jell together a bit better in real life, not that they look bad here.

This is a more detailed picture.

The wide edging added a lot. Somehow, it helps reinforce the idea that the design is actually planned. I wanted to finish the edging in something feathery, to soften and contrast with the very linear nature of the rest of it, but I didn't have the right yarn in my stash, so I went with a chenille-type yarn.

What I did is crochet 3 stitches together, chain two, repeat, to get the holes.

All in all, a success. One of those times when it works out better than you hoped.

On the Edge

Okay, I fixed overshooting the edge.

The bottom strip has been reknit so that it no longer goes below the edge. Now the afghan is fixed, right?

Right?

No. Of course not.

The arrow is pointing at the white line which is delineating where the strip above the bottom strip should have stopped. Yes, it turns out that the strip just above the bottom strip was also too long.

I wasn't about to tackle unraveling that strip.

So I cut across it to free the yarn, unraveled it to the white line, and tied the pieces off.

Now all I have to do is weave the ends in, and I'm back to where I needed to be.

So much for the detour -- onward and I am so counting every possible edge stitch from here on out!

Over the Edge

"I'm going to have to be careful not to overshoot the corners."

That's right, "I'm going to have to be careful not to overshoot the corners."

You already know where this is going.

Here's the current progress.

Yes, the lower right corner is screwed up. I was sure when I was knitting it that I was nowhere near being too close to the edge.

Here's the details.

The white numbers are the number of ridges or stitches. The red numbers are the standings at the corners, with a minus meaning above where the edge of the shawl should be (in other words, where I'm not in trouble), and a plus meaning I've overshot the edge. As you can see, I got in trouble at the +2 corner, recovered, and then it went bad quickly, for a stunning 35 stitches at the end over where the afghan's corner should be.

Go, me! I don't screw up small!

Okay, I could make it a design feature, where it asymmetrically goes down into the edging I will eventually put around the entire afghan, but I don't think I want to do more than 35 rows of edging. So I'll pull it out and do it right.

Drat, I hate doing something twice. But that's the price of winging it, which I do enjoy. I guess I pay this time.

I Feel A Little Like Balboa

I finally see the other side.

Here is the current progress.

(That's a yardstick, just to give an idea of size.)

Now that the right side is defined, it's going to go quickly. It also looks like the strips effect is going to come through, which is nice.

I'm going to have to be careful not to overshoot the corners.

It's also time to think about the next one. I'll probably take a 'break' and do one that's just color play, like the autumn triangular shawl, and then maybe the entrelac in the round as an experiment, or maybe the fabulous Mona Lisa that Wooly Thoughts just posted -- I'm thinking black contrasted with all the shades of pink and red, maybe call it Mona in the Sky with Diamonds?

On My Wish List

On my wish list is figuring out a way to do entrelac in the round. I figured out how to do it around a square -- the trick is to put two squares next to each other. You can see from the arrows below how the direction changes at the point of the square.

Here is how the entire piece looked.

This was made out of Koigu -- the only time I've ever had enough Koigu to make an entire afghan. Koigu really is lovely stuff.

Anyway, I keep thinking there must be a way to do entrelac around a circle. I've seen and bought patterns where there are a couple of rounds, as in certain hats and felted bags, but they always turn out to be knitted from the outside in. There is no good way to determine how to continue outward.

I thought I'd solved it at one point by thinking about pi shawls -- in theory, I could do one round of entrelac, do triangles to even it off, like when adding entrelac inside of a pattern, like here:

Then when you have a plain round, you double it like in ordinary pi shawls, then you do triangles to start off entrelac, then you do two rounds of entrelac, and repeat adding triangles to get to a plain round so you can double again. In short, each of the levels in the pi shawl contain a doubled number of entrelac rounds.

In theory, it works. In practice, it is tripped up by the dirty secret of the pi shawl: the pi doubling formula only works because of how forgiving knitting is.

Pi shawls work best with lacy patterns. Even plain knitting will stress and strain them. Think about it: at the doubling rows, right above a row is one that contains twice as many stitches. It shouldn't work, really, at least, not without puckering. But the row tension in knitting will even out over the length, so having the stitches a little squeezed and then a little stretched out as you keep knitting doesn't really matter.

However, in entrelac, it does matter, because you are knitting on the bias, and there is far less stretch in that direction. My experiment failed very quickly, because it was too tight.

It still seems to me that there should be some formula for figuring out how many stitches get added to the round as the entrelac circle moves outward, but I haven't figured it out yet. It would still depend on some stretch, since the bottom diagonal half of an entrelac square should be smaller than the top half, because you are moving outward on the circle, but I think over that short a distance, there really is enough stretch so you could simply knit the usual square.

Maybe you add a stitch to each new row of squares so that successive rounds contain larger squares, or maybe you add one stitch for every eight stitches in the square, or something like that. Maybe it will be easier to start with one of those center-in patterns, and then try to work outward after that.

I may have to simply bite the bullet and just improvise, and see what happens. Maybe from there I can come up with a recipe, perhaps even a formula.

Hmmmmm. Maybe after the current one.....maybe maybe maybe.

More Progress, More Problems To Solve

This has turned out to be more interesting to construct than I thought.

Here's the current state.

I've turned the corner. (groan....sorry) But seriously, now that I've got corners, the size of the final piece is becoming defined. It feels a lot like finding the corners when doing a puzzle, which is a pretty appropriate image.

I'm just at the point where I can continue the colors, too, and see if the overlapping lines theme comes through or not.

Here's the latest problem and solution.

The white lines were where the piece was when I was ready to define the bottom edge, and A and B were two points. The question was, could they be the points along the bottom edge?

Well, once I thought about it, it turned out to be simple to tell. Since I started each strip off of the left edge consistently at a 45-degree angle, if A and B were both on the bottom edge, then the arrow up from A to the point and the arrow up from B to the point should be the same length. I think you can see that they aren't. A up to the point was 15 stitches more.

It took me a while to figure out how to add the new strip, but the result is the one with the zig-zags. I cast on by picking up along the B edge, and then added 15 more stitches, then knitted the strip up towards A. (I did it that way to try to keep the strips so they contrasted more with the ones they were next to.) Afterward, I added the red strip just to the right of B.

Figuring out that the sides of the triangles will always be equal if the points are on the edge is going to help enormously. This has to be true, because the top of the triangle will always be 90 degrees, and the side angles will be 45 degrees, so a triangle with the hypotenuse on the bottom edge has to equilateral. Always. Each and every one.

What could be easier? To find my edges as I add more strips, all I have to do is count.

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..

Figuring It Out

Here is the current situation.

I've discovered a couple of things. I thought of the middle largest strip to be the main color, with the other lines following and crossing it. However, as I go along, I see that the more I work around the middle line, the farther out a crossing has to happen. For example, when I add a new strip, it can't get right next to the middle strip anymore. I'm wondering if this will make the final piece difficult to read, that it will lose the sense of strips crossing each other, and turn into puzzle pieces instead.

I guess we'll find out.

I'd also thought that I could just keep going in one direction as I knitted, because that's how it worked out for the first couple of strips. I cast on, and then increased at the end of the ridge when I wanted to make a corner. Well, that works fine for the bottom pieces, but now that I'm adding strips at the top edge, it doesn't work so well.

Here's why, and what I did to work around it.

We are looking at the strip with the letters and arrows. The first row of that color was cast on at A, with the knitting going right to left in the usual fashion. It had to go in that direction so as to have a clean line with the adjoining color (the other direction would have given us a purl ridge, with the colors mixed). So far, so good. I increased a stitch every time I got to the edge to keep the shape.

At point B, to make the corner, all I had to do was cast off the stitches I didn't need any longer, and continue on. Still easy.

At C, I got to the difficulty. The D edge (in yellow) had to be picked up right to left, so I couldn't just keep knitting from C down, because that would have been left to right. Well, I could have just cut the yarn and started at D, but I didn't like more loose ends if I didn't need them.

So I made a very loose loop of yarn from the edge down to D, and then just knitted it in at the back, like you do to knit in a yarn tail. It is much tidier looking, and no ends to ever get loose. I did the same thing when I got to F.

Here is what the back looks like, with arrows to the knitted in loops.

Very tidy, which if you've seen some other entries here, is not always my strong suit.

By the way, here is the collection of yarn that I am using.

Not all of them may make it into the final product. I'm saving the Cocoon purple on the bottom left for the edging.

I Wonder What Will Happen?

Here is the new one started.

The design is loosely based on several quilts, where lines intersect and cross over each other. I'm making it up as I go along, so even though I have a general idea and guiding principle, I have no real idea how it is going to look at the end.

That's the excitement.

The yarns came together because I happened to have several with orange and purple, so I teamed them up, and my friend Sandy came over and helped create a grouping. Most of the yarns are patterned, so it will probably have a quilty feel to it.  Here's a closer look.

I can't wait to find out what I'm knitting.