The first word I drew from the words suggested on Patreon this month is Wren, suggested by Susan C, a Patreon supporter. Wrens are brash little brown birds with their tails held at a jaunty angle. Their call is not beautiful: they buzz at each other in warning when I come out the front door. They nest in odd spots. Someone in my twitter feed left a packing envelope on a shelf outside this spring and then discovered she couldn’t throw the envelope away because it was full of a nest and eggs. Then she forgot to throw it away when the babies fledged, and when she came back, there was another wren nest!
I love them.
This particular lace pattern is a little unusual in that it gently undulates along the bottom, but is straight across the top. Keep this in mind in your designs!
Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. I make three of these into knitting stitches each month: the second and third (posted on the first day of the next month) are drawn from the collection of new words; the first is drawn from the collection of unused words. A random number generator helps me choose these, 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.
The stitch patterns are not meant in any way to look like the original words; the words are the seeds of my creativity.
Follow link for charts and instructions
