Design ideas looking for a good home.

I’ve been talking with my friend Sarah Sipe about designing for a while, and now I’m also having design conversations with other designers as well. Top that off with reading books about design and browsing through patterns on Ravelry, and my brain is awash with ideas. All the ideas bump against each other and spark still more ideas.

I’ve heard of stash-acquisition-beyond-life-expectancy (that is, the acquisition of more yarn than one can use in a lifetime). Right now I feel as if I’ve got design-ideas-beyond-life-expectancy and it’s gumming up the works. I’ve got a list of things I’ve planned for the year or two ahead of me, and I just can’t deal with all these other things.

So I’m going to put some of them here for anyone who wants to use them. Take them! Be inspired by them and modify them. I’ll be happy if someone runs with them – I just need to get them out of my head. Sometimes a design motif will fit nicely in a rectangle or border but not so much in other shapes. There are some designs that have the wrong proportion for fitting in a triangle as an all over pattern, no matter how one tries. Like this:

Motif doesn't fit neatly in triangle.

I used the proportions of a Shetland lace motif, Shetland Twins, from Barbara Walker’s first Treasury to make the motif outline, though the proportions would need to be changed for different stitch patterns.

Anyway, to fit nicely in a traditional triangle shawl, the motif would need to reach out to the dotted line at each repeat. The spacing isn’t right. So, what to do if a triangle is what’s wanted? These are some ideas I’ve come up with recently for how one might space the motifs. The spaces in between the gaps could be filled with stockinette or garter or a ground stitch pattern. possible shawl layout possible shawl layout possible shawl layout In each case I used a simple mathematical progression to change how many motifs are added to each row or column. One more on each side, then add two more on each side, then three, then four…

Depending on the size of the motifs and the triangle, different mathematical progressions could be used (the Fibonacci Sequence, for instance).

And there we have it!