Sometimes when I design a larger stitch pattern, there’s a part of it that I think would be good as a smaller pattern. I think of these as excerpts or outtakes.
Here is an outtake from the Vulture needlework chart. I found the motif charming: it reminds me of feathers or leaves. (A friend remarked that it specifically reminded her of peacock feathers.)
This excerpt isn’t a coded word anymore.
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Sometimes when I design a larger stitch pattern, there’s a part of it that I think would be good as a smaller pattern. I think of these as excerpts or outtakes.
This stitch pattern is an outtake from Join: I took a vertical excerpt from it that struck me as a likely candidate, and then I changed which was row 1 to make it start in the logical spot.
(This excerpt isn’t a coded word anymore.)
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This leaf pattern is made from a motif from cariad, published a couple weeks ago. Sometimes I like to make a subsection of a bigger pattern into a smaller one.
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This is a vertical excerpt from Charisma. I like the vertical striped sections in the original, but I also wondered how it would look with those removed. (This is therefore no longer an encoded word.)
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Last week, I shared a stitch pattern with you that I’d derived from a motif from Ply. This is a variation on last week’s pattern, because I saw that if I changed things around slightly, I could nestle some extra columns in between the first set, shifted just a little bit vertically. A standard term for this that’s used in pattern design is half-drop. Mathematicians refer to this as an example of translational symmetry. (This kind of symmetry involves sliding copies of a motif around without changing the shape of it.)
Note: this doesn’t count as secret code anymore because it’s been manipulated a lot.
This was originally meant as a coordinating stitch pattern for Paradise; I took an excerpt of the original stitch pattern as described here. I don’t know whether it was the yarn or the gauge, but I was having trouble making the decrease lines visible, so I made the background stitches into garter stitches. Aside from the rib columns, however, the wrong side rows are pretty plain.
I am not certain how well this would actually coordinate with Paradise, given the garter background, but it’s worth a try. Feel free to noodle around with it! You could always change it back to stockinette if you like. Or try purling the wrong side rows all the way across. Always feel free to mess with my stitch patterns.
This isn’t secret code. This is the result of starting a secret code swatch back in August and having to start over because there were excellent skull faces in it. (It was not appropriate to have skull faces in that particular context.)
I’ve fiddled a bit with the design – removing the non-skull bits and elongating the top a bit. I’m not sure the proportions are anatomically correct, but I like the effect, so.
Immediately after I posted about using a subset of rows from a complex chart as a coordinating stitch pattern, I started wondering about a subset of columns.
This is naturally more complicated, as the decreases and increases have to be balanced out, which means a good deal more fiddling with the stitch pattern. I think it might also be less useful – though it might help with situations where the desired stitch pattern doesn’t quite fit the required width.
Anyway, I decided to play with a chart, knit swatches, and see what happened. If it didn’t work, at least I’d know.
In the end, it took a lot more work and thought to get something satisfactory. This is not necessarily a barrier, but I felt that people considering trying it for themselves should know. (I think this sort of thing is fun; not everybody does.)
I was browsing through the stitch patterns to find an example for an upcoming blog post when my attention was caught by Serendipity. When I designed that stitch pattern, I hadn’t yet started isolating motifs from the larger patterns. I realized that I should pull the heart motif out of the bigger design for you, and here it is.
I wanted all the yarnovers inside the heart, and so I replaced some of the yarnover-and-decrease combinations from the original stitch pattern with 1/1 crosses. This sort of trick comes in very handy sometimes.
