Étude no 23: noodling around a little with bunny ears back

Periodically I like to play with techniques in swatches to see what I can do with them. When I write about this, I call the posts my études, because they’re somewhat like the exercises musicians do for practicing.

This time I was looking at a potential chart for one of my Patreon words, and wondering if I could make something work. I had an idea about a combination to try and I decided to make a swatchlet to see.

column of YOs 1

The potential chart involves a column of single YOs like this.

column of YOs 2

I could just put alternating single decreases like this, or otherwise place single decreases elsewhere in the row.

column of YOs 3

But I wondered what would happen if I used a bunny ears decrease above each single YO on the wrong side rows.

A digression: in the past I settled on calling these 3-to-2 decreases, but two of the design tools I use have incorporated them as decreases now, and they both use the “bunny ears” terminology (with slight variations). In the interest of standardization, I’ve decided to follow suit. Here’s the basics of the bunny ears decreases.

I realized there were four possible permutations to try. The first two involve purling the two kinds of bunny ear decreases on purled rows; the other two involve knitting the bunny ears decreases on purled rows. (note, I should correct the row numbering above.)

I worked these four permutations in a column without any plain rows in between, so they don’t exactly match the charts above. I worked six rows of each variation (three pairs of YO row followed by bunny ears decrease).

This shows both sides of the fabric. The first, second, and fourth are all right, but not very interesting. I actively like the one that’s knit bunny ears inward on purled rows (permutation number three of the charts above). I even like both sides of it. I hope to get around to knitting a better swatch, but I do get distracted by shiny things on a regular basis.

advantages: nifty-looking
disadvantage: no plain rest row.

In the end, I decided to use a different chart entirely for the Patreon word in question, but I’ve certainly learned something from the experimentation, which is always a good thing.