Fallingblog

I’ve been a little reclusive since I finished the bulk of my work on the book, but now I have some stuff to share. First of all, I have plane tickets and hotel reservations to go to TNNA this summer in Columbus, Ohio — actually, that’s only 2 weeks from now. I’m getting in under the Cooperative Press umbrella, and primarily will be there to push my upcoming book, which is currently in the layout stage. In all likelihood, I will have the book itself when I attend Rhinebeck and Stitches East this October.

But in the meantime, I’m not relaxing — I’ve got several more patterns in the works. The two I have on the needles are scarves in the 7-8 sts/in range, and one is pictured here. It’s called “Parallax”, which is a catchy name, if scientifically inaccurate. I’m knitting it in Kauni Effektgarn. I actually have almost double this amount done — it’s a shockingly easy pattern, and I can get quite a lot done in short order.

The other scarf I have on the needles I’m going to keep under wraps (except to those who see me working on it locally) until I have more of it done. It’s a sort of magnum opus — I’ve written the pattern, and it’s 114 pages long. Now I just have to knit it. It’s going relatively quickly despite its complexity, and I hope to have a majority done before the shows in October. Because each row is different, it keeps my interest well; and because there is an element of randomness there is an infinitesimal chance that any two — even made by different people — will ever be the same. I am of course making my exact configuration available in the pattern for those who’d rather just do it exactly as I did. I’d like to find out what the exact statistical likelihood is, so if you’re a statistician, please get in touch :>

When these patterns are made available, I think they’ll be digital only.

Anyway, if you’re going to TNNA, look for the guy with the knitted tie on!

Hey, just a quick update! I’ve been out of touch while I’ve been in the home stretch on the book. My deadline was a few days ago — but it was also Amanda’s birthday, and my publisher is a little behind on her previous project, and graciously gave me a little extra time. I’ll have the manuscript in her hands this weekend. Then the fun begins!

Also, Lela Nargi is publishing a book which mentions my work! I did an email interview with her some months ago, and sent some photos. I hope everything comes out well! It’s both humbling and inspiring to be mentioned alongside all these other great and groundbreaking knitters.

Go check out Astounding Knits at Lela Nargi’s website now, and put it on your list of books to pre-order (along with mine!) when it’s available.

Next weekend (March 12th and 13th) I will be at FiberCamp Boston, teaching basic double-knitting and two circular needle techniques. Last year’s event was great fun and I hope for an even better turnout this year. Come learn, teach or just hang out with other fiber enthusiasts — registration is still up!

On March 26th, I will be making an appearance at Mind’s Eye Yarns in Cambridge for the Red Line Yarn Crawl. I’ll be showing off my new creations, talking up my book, selling a few patterns and taking names for contact when “Extreme Double Knitting” is available for pre-order. Also, Amanda will be there doing knitter-centric chair massages and hand massages!

This is the first photo of the final piece in my upcoming book. It’s a seamless, four-color self-lining double-knit shoulder bag. The strap is adjustable — one long and one very short strap with a buckle — and there is a fold-over flap that buttons down. I call it Whorl’d Tree. I see the pattern as a sort of stylized view of a forest from inside — the brown of the roots, the green of the canopy, and the water flowing in between to feed it all. Of course, it’s my hope that other folks try other color combinations — I’m sure it’d be very striking in flame colors and black too. The fabric is ridiculously sturdy, verging on inflexible, which is good for a bag — I can put a #2 knitting needle in this one without worrying it’ll poke through. The pattern is only on the outside — the inside is all white, with blue edging, and a completely serendipitous side-effect of the pattern: there is a relief pattern of the whorls on the inside. If my tension was a little better, I probably wouldn’t have those, but honestly I like them, and so have other people who’ve seen it in person. I have many model shots of it as well but will be saving those for the book. The cast-on is at the bottom of the piece (sorry for the bad/blurry photo) and uses a 2-needle double-knit cast-on I designed as well as a very strange needle configuration — 2 circulars and 3 DPNs are necessary to make this work properly, at least until you’re about 1/3 of the way up the  bag.

The piece is done in Valley Yarns Northampton — but could just as easily be done in Cascade 220. Because of the self-lining, it takes 3-4 times as much white as any of the other colors.

Despite my ambivalence toward children, I thought these things up long ago. The only issue has been the construction. I am big on seamless designs, or at least designs that only require the picking up of stitches. Sewing together is great for afghans, but I feel it shouldn’t be relied upon for smaller items, except perhaps some knitted toys. Baby booties are just glorified socks, so I quickly departed from the modular designs I was planning on using and researched other baby booties, sock construction, and sizing. I knit quite a few baby booties — but only one of each, so as not to be in any way useful for a real baby — while trying to understand sizing and the merits of various types of construction. The problem was that most booties are either actually sock patterns, so they fold flat in a vertical orientation, or they focus on the body of the boot, making the sole an afterthought. For these, I really wanted to make the sole the focal point, for obvious reasons.

These are the first in what I believe will be a series of works which will use a combination of doubled-yarn work and double-knitting. I determined that one can use the stitches I call “2k2” and “2p2” as shaping elements in the double-knit box posted earlier, but one can also use them more thoroughly as body stitches, in this case, garter stitch. At any point in the work I can separate the two ends and use them to make double-knitting, which is only a little off the gauge of the garter stitch, easily blocked into uniformity. In the case of these booties, blocking isn’t necessary since it’s best to have the sole be just a little smaller than the top of the bootie anyway.

Well, not really, but since appearing atop my article in Twist Collective, this hat has been the most-requested unpublished pattern. I was never really happy with the original pattern — the closure I used made it kind of pointy and I didn’t want to publish it that way. On top of that, the chart I based it on was lifted directly from Jessica Tromp’s amazing website. In light of that, I wasn’t at liberty to publish it anyway. I made some efforts to do my own chart that looked similar, but never came out with anything quite as elegant as Jessica’s. So, at Cat Bordhi’s recommendation, I emailed Jessica and to my surprise she was very happy to let me publish the pattern! Of course she’ll get credit for the original chart. So that left me with the responsibility to do better with the crown of the hat. Some fiddling around with decreases later, I had a few revisions of the chart and settled on this one, in which the decreases actually seem like they’re part of the design, and don’t interrupt the chart at all. I love this hat now — it’s one of my favorites. The other neat thing about it is that I knit it in the space of a week — the fastest hat I’ve ever done, and I could have done it even quicker if I decided I didn’t need the fold-up brim.

I gave the hat a new name (not that it had a name before), calling it “Struktur”. The German meaning of this word is particularly apt for any knitting project, but for one that looks like it’s made from skeletal building blocks assembled by M.C. Escher, it was perfect.

You can see more views of this hat here, here, here, here, and here. For those who are interested in the pattern, I am planning to wait until the book is published but it is possible I may release this pattern ahead of the book if demand is high enough.

The paucity of good tie patterns in knitting has irked me for some time. Most ties are overly-complex, constructed in the same way you’d sew one, or overly simple, looking somewhat tacky, or done on the bias, which makes the damn thing too stretchy. No offense meant to anyone who’s designed and published a tie. I’m sure there are some good ones out there. I figured out a while ago that double-knitting could be well applied to ties — the fabric doesn’t curl, it has no wrong side, and you can literally do any charted pattern on one without worrying about the non-existent wrong side. Hence, these two.

They’re both done in Crystal Palace Panda Silk (Thanks to Crystal Palace for the free yarn!). They’re entitled “Silk City” and “Silk Road”, respectively from top to bottom. Silk City was a snap — once I’d worked out the tie measurements and knitted gauge, it’s just a matter of planning out which rows to decrease on and keep working the pattern. The pattern itself has a ridiculous 70-row repeat, but it’s really all the same stuff, just shifted over a bit each time. Silk Road was no picnic; it was the one piece I dreaded designing most, not being sure I could work further decreases into the already increase/decrease-heavy fabric. Needless to say, I figured it out, but the limitation is that the decreases can only be put in every 16 rows if you want them to be invisible. So I decreased every 32 rows, which made the tie just a bit longer than its brother. They both tie just fine, however, without any awkward tail bit showing. I’m planning to include my tie blank in the book too, and will be interested to see what other patterns people put on it.