Balance?

I'm about 25 rows into knitting the raspberry shawl and I'm starting to feel worried about the balance of open space from the center panel to the wings.  It's a little hard to judge unblocked.

However, the transitions I created for the wings get more airy before they get less airy, so it's just going to get more open.  One problem in creating charts is that on paper, more symbols look "heavier" and less symbols look "lighter" when, in fact, with lace the opposite is often true.  

I really like how the center panel has been designed and I'm excited about the short row point.  In fact, I even love my transitions between three related patterns for the wings.  They might very well make a great shawl on their own, without a center panel.  But I'm beginning to think the two don't fit together well.  I've become rather brutal about frogging things that aren't working for me in yarn.  I have a rather large bin of half finished quilting projects that will probably never see the light of day because they stopped working at some point.  It's empowering somehow when working with yarn that you can reclaim your fiber!

Center Panel Shawl Update: Not as easy as I hoped

Five techniques later from The Principles of Knitting, and I was no closer to finding a short row method that made a nice point for my next shawl.  So off to the next resource, the internet, where I found this lovely gem:
The Fleegle Symmetrical Short Row--No Wraps, No Holes, No Hassles

And now I have a sample that looks like this:

This swatch is basically the very bottom tip of the shawl with only a portion of the
center panel design, two tiny corners of the wings of the shawl, and a bit of border.

Fleegle's system creates a bit of a change of direction of the stitches along the point, but no unsightly holes and no major disruption on the front or the back.  It has a tricky bit where you knit or purl into the stitch below, but I think it's worth the effort.  

Now the next question, do I like where the center panel design ends or would I rather it be pushed now into the point a bit more?  Basically that's a question of would the eye like a balance amount of white space (or raspberry heather space, in the case of this yarn) or would the extra fabric near the point pull your eye down in a pleasing way?

Short Rows and The Principles of Knitting

The new shawl I'm designing has a center panel that I want to come down to a point before adding the border.  I think I'm going to try this doing short rows, but a quick swatch test showed me that wrap and turn short rows were going to be painful in lace weight yarn.

So off to my studio for the huge tome, The Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt.  If you've never seen this 700 page book (I have the revised edition), you really should track it down.  Hiatt is the geeky-ist of geeks when it comes to knitting.  She has five different techniques for creating short rows, plus variations on those techniques!

You have to get used to some of the language in this book.  When she wrote it in 1988, knitting wan't as big as it is today.  She uses some non-standard terms compared to those in popular use today.  (For instance, she uses "inside" and "outside" instead of "right side" and "wrong side.")  However, this book has just about everything you ever wanted to know about anything having to do with knitting-- and many ways to do it!

Ocean Waves Stole Reflections

I finally finished the Ocean Waves shawl that I was designing and have uploaded the free pattern to Ravelry and to Craftsy.

My goal was to make a fully reversible shawl design that showed off and worked with the color changes in hand dyed yarn and I think that I succeeded.  The first problem was finding reversible stitch patterns that looked similar on both sides.  I settled on a modified version of the Old Shale Lace pattern where an equal number of rows of knits or perls alternate with a the lacy row that gives the pattern it's curves.  That was kind of dull by itself so I then looked for a textured pattern that was also reversible.  After looking through all my stitch dictionaries, a web search for reversible knitting patterns took me to the pattern for the Crown Stitch.  I modified this pattern slightly so that it, too, looked the same on either side.  and put them together.

This shawl is knitted lengthwise so that the color changes wrap around your body rather than going up and down the back,

I originally thought I might add some small fish beads to accentuate the idea of an ocean, but they were ultimately too heavy and too large for the pattern.

In designing the shawl, I knit until I ran out of yarn, so this pattern would work well for an unknown amount of yarn.  There are two stopping places in the 34 row repeat.  It could also be knit wider or narrower by adding or subtracting groups of 80 stitches from the cast on row.  Why 80 stitches?  The crown stitch takes groups of five stitches to complete and the waves of knits and perls are groups of 16 stitches plus 17 for the ends.  Turns out the multiples of five that work for both come every 80 stitches.

At some point I will knit at least some swatches of this pattern in different weights of yarn.  I think that the pattern could be modified for a variety of uses-- blanket, cushion, scarf, etc.

Grafting

A couple of weeks ago I grafted together the ends of the cowls for my BFF Cowl project.  It turns out to be nearly impossible to graft anything together that has a mix of knits and purls but I did my best.

I don't think you'd be able to see the errors from a galloping horse, which for something I'm not putting in a competition is a good rule of thumb.

I found that I got completely lost trying to read and follow standard written grafting directions.  They just make my head hurt.  But if I look at the diagrams in directions like this and then just tell myself where my needle should go to get knit stitches or purl stitches, then I do ok.  Not perfect, but ok.  This might be a result of being a very visual person.  It's like doing the long tail cast on, who can figure out these directions until you feel them in your hands?

Hopping into April with Daisy the Bunny

Last night I couldn't knit another round on the sleeves.  I had the desire to see something FINISHED, so I started this little guy while dinner was baking and finished him today.  I love knitting, but crochet often calls me back.  Crochet just seems so quick to me and I can read a pattern effortlessly.  And the few times I made an error and had to rip back-- you just tug and one stitch at a time comes out and when you've "erased" the problem you just start up again.  So much easier than tinking away on a knitting project!  So thank you Lyon Brand Yarn for this free and cute project!

Daisy

Two at a Time... Sleeves!

I'm making sleeves for my Alison Pullover.  After all the work on the body of a sweater, the sleeves seem like they should fly by, but I swear they take almost as long as the sweater body.  One thing that slows me down a bit is using the two at a time Magic Loop method.  I learned how to do this from this excellent post on Jimmy Beans Wool.  You have to keep going back and forth between two balls of yarn and readjust the sleeves on the cable.  The first couple of rows are hard as the knitting doesn't have a lot of weight and you have to be very careful as you pick up each sleeve that you don't turn them into mobius strips.  After a while, the rhythm starts to flow, but there's no getting around all that shifting on the needles and dropping and picking up a new yarn every twenty-some stitches.   The good thing is, though, you finish both sleeves at the same time!

While I'm talking about sleeves, here's my homemade hook on stitch counter.  It is a stitch counter that is supposed to go over the end of a knitting needle, only  I took an endpin (used to make dangle earrings) and beaded it so that the stitch counter fit between two largish beads.  I twisted the end into a loop and attached it to a removable stitch marker.  I keep moving it up the side of the first sleeve every time I do the increases so I don't forget to change the count.