Openwork Hourglass: this is an existing stitch pattern that coordinates nicely with a lot of mine. This isn’t a surprise; it’s basically a repeat of a motif that turns up in a lot of my bigger patterns.
Multiple of 6 stitches and 8 rows.
(I know this isn’t a very long post, but I thought it might come in handy for people anyway.)
Yesterday’s needlework chart for Wish turns out to work quite well as the basis for a mosaic knitting chart. I ran out of time to knit a swatch, but the nice thing about mosaic knitting is that the charts are similar to the final appearance of the knitting.
The thing about mosaic knitting is that it just looks difficult. It’s really easy to do! Basically, you’re knitting two row stripes, and slipping stitches from the row below to make the contrasting pattern. If you can knit stripes, you can knit mosaic patterns.
I’ve started being able to post another knitting stitch pattern each month, thanks to my Patreon supporters. For this mid-month post, I used a random number generator to pick a word out of what I call my word hoard: the list of words that supporters past and present have suggested for me to encode as knitting stitches. This month’s word for the middle of the month is Wish, suggested by Nim.
Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. A random number generator helps me choose the word of the month, and then I get to work, first turning the letters into numbers, then charting the numbers onto grids in various ways. Finally, when I make the chart into lace, I turn the marked squares into yarnovers and work out where to place the corresponding decreases. (I usually make lace; occasionally I make cables instead.) I also make a chart for any craft that uses a square grid for designing; this goes in a separate post.
I was having a conversation with a knitter in my Ravelry group about the difficulty of figuring out where to place beads symmetrically when all the stitches come in pairs. That is, there’s a lot of pairs of knit stitches, or a lot of double yarnovers. That conversation led to some experimentation on my part based on her ideas, my thoughts about them, and on my knitting reference books.
The thing most on my mind this morning is that my next Patreon goal was reached last night, and this means that I will be turning two words suggested by my Patreon supporters into knitting stitches each month! I am very excited and pleased about that.
My original blog post for today is below.
This month, the random number generator chose the word Unicorn, suggested by Katherine and Ange on Patreon. I went through a unicorn obsession in my early teens, so it gave me pleasure to see this word come up. I like the lace, too.
Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. A random number generator helps me choose the word of the month, and then I get to work, first turning the letters into numbers, then charting the numbers onto grids in various ways. Finally, when I make the chart into lace, I turn the marked squares into yarnovers and work out where to place the corresponding decreases. (I usually make lace; occasionally I make cables instead.) I also make a chart for any craft that uses a square grid for designing; this goes in a separate post.
Four more dollars a month will fund me enough to make two such patterns each month. Won’t you subscribe? Woohoo! We got there! Two words a month, coming up! (You’re welcome to subscribe anyway, of course. 😉)
Periodically I like to try out techniques I haven’t used before and experiment with them. When I write about this, I call the posts my études, because they’re somewhat like the exercises musicians do for practicing.
I was browsing through my copy of Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury when my eye lit upon the Tunnel Eyelet stitch. I hadn’t really noticed it before, and when I read the instructions I was a little confused about how it worked. With many knitting instructions, I understand them better if I try them, so I did just that.
A friend suggested that there’s no reason why my book reviews should be limited to new books, and this made sense to me. So when I acquired a nifty book at a local craft supply reuse shop called the Scrap Exchange, I immediately realized that it was a good candidate.
Decorative Knitting, by Kate Haxell and Luise Roberts, is a book about ways of embellishing and decorating knitting. Many of these are fairly standard techniques, but some of them are quite unusual. When I was flipping through the book, the moment I knew I needed to buy it and look at it more carefully was when I noticed the swatches of inlay.
Occasionally I read forum posts or blog posts or project pages on Ravelry complaining about the “hump” in the center of the top edge of a certain kind of crescent shawl. Some people speculate that it has to do with what kind of cast-on is used, but I think it’s inherent to the structure of the shawl itself (though sometimes it appears and other times it doesn’t).
Here’s why I think that.
