apparknitchik

The Thin Green Line

If you've ever had to rip back your knitting, you'll understand how heartbreaking it can be, especially if you're working on a complicated lace piece -- it can mean tinking back hours or days of work.

Many knitters will advocate using a life-line -- that is, stringing a thread through the work.  What the life-line does is secure one row of stitches so that you can take your knitting off the needle and rip back quickly to the row that the life-line runs through.   The life-line holds that set of stitches secure so that you can't accidently rip back further than you'd intended.

If you're interested in learning more about life-lines and how to use them, Jackie Erickson-Schweitzer has an excellent write-up about them over on her Heartstrings website.

This, of course, is the moment where I admit that I rarely use life-lines myself.  I usually figure that if I work at a sensible pace, if I don't work on complicated lace pieces when I'm tired or out-of-sorts, well, I don't need them, and any mistakes I do make I figure I can fix without having to rip back.  For me, that's usually faster than ripping back and re-knitting (although I will admit that there are probably times when there's nothing else to be done).

But, if you take a look at the slowly progressing Hana-bi shawl...

 

... you will see that I have inserted a life-line.

Because Hana-bi is worked bottom-up, and the border takes a while to work, my test knitter asked if she could start working before I actually had the final draft of the pattern written -- so I sent her the instructions for starting the shawl and working the border pattern, while I figured out the rest the shawl.  She commented that it was kind of like working a Mystery Shawl.

In fact, for both of us, right now, it *is* kind of like working a Mystery Shawl, which is precisely why I've inserted a life-line through the last row of the border section.  I know that this much of the shawl works as I've planned it.  Above the life-line?  Well, not total mystery, but I had this vision of how I wanted the top to be shaped, and the Tech Guy and I calculated how to make that happen and created the charts, but, really?

I've never done something like this before, so right now, it feels a little bit like I've stepped off into the knitting void.  I'm prepared to rip back and re-work things if the shaping and the math needs some tweaking -- but I'm not prepared to rip back the whole thing, hence the life-line.  Whatever happens, the border stays the way it is, because I rather like how it looks, so the life-line ensures that if I have to change what's above the border, then at least I won't have to start over again from the beginning. 

I do suspect that what we've charted out will work as planned -- and I do have a couple of other back-up plans if for some strange reason it turns out that I'm wrong.  But I'm very happy to have put that life-line in, just in case.

Fireworks

Yes, it has been that long since I updated the blog, and I'd been thinking for a while that it was time for a bit of a revival.

So I thought what I'd do was trace how a new design comes about, at least for me.  At the very least, it's kind of a way for me to go all kind of "meta" about my process; maybe you'll find it interesting too.

What I'm working on at the moment is a design I called "Hana-bi", Japanese for "fireworks".   As with much of my designing, it started with a trip to my LYS about two weeks ago, and the news that a new yarn had just arrived in the shop:

 

Okay, a few thoughts:  first, cotton and linen are not normally my cup of tea as a knitter, but laceweight is, and this yarn is actually very nice quality and very good value for price.  I'm on a tight budget, so at the very least, trying something out with this gives me a chance to see how it works up, and also gives me scope to move on to a different, maybe more expensive laceweight if I like what I'm noodling out.  Also?  When someone arrives in the yarn shop, and they see the yarn, and there's actually a sample of something in it displayed there, they can get a good idea of how the yarn will work up, whether they ever knit that particular sample or not.  And the yarn is new, so, we figured, well, why not a new design?

And when I say "we", I mean the folks at the yarn shop.  They're a great support for me, and a pretty good sounding board when I have new ideas, AND, they often send me in a direction that sparks something new, as was the case here.

Then we talked colour. I have a partiality towards green.  I'd likely make everything I ever designed in green, because it's my favorite colour.  You, though, may not like green.  The nice folks at the yarn shop remind me of that fact, that there are lots of other colours out there, and they are all loved, by someone.

So, we laid out a few colours of the Pima Lino, and finally settled on one that I believe the folks at Diamond Yarns call "cranberry".  It is, really, and truly, the most vibrant shade of pink that I've ever set eyes on.  And it reminded me of this:

 

The film Hana-Bi, written by, directed by, and starring the great Takeshi Kitano.  I have seen this film.  I love this film.  It's not for the faint of heart, this film.  But, suddenly, my design had a name.

A yarn.  A colour.  A name.  But, you know, no actual pattern.

So, I set about browsing my stitch pattern books, and at one point, thought about doing a variation on Sunspots, until I realized how crazy that was going to be A. in a shawl and B. in a fine laceweight.  More searching led me to the lovely "Fountain" pattern in one of Barbara Walker's treasuries, and at that point?  I knew I had my fireworks.

Next step was working a swatch -- some of you may have seen this, I think I posted a photo of the thing in-progress last week on Twitter, but this is the whole thing done and blocked:

 

Actually, what you can't see is the top of the swatch, which is where I played around with a couple of ideas for finishing it off.  And you can't see a nice close-up of the blackberry coloured bead, which is my current favorite colour of bead, AND FOR WHICH I HAD TO MAKE A FLYING TRIP INTO TORONTO on one of the WORST WEATHER DAYS IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS because I HAD TO HAVE *THAT* BEAD for *THIS* YARN.

Yes, I can get a little obsessive, but I loved that colour bead on this colour yarn so much, that it was worth it.  Totally worth it.

Ah, but I bet you're wondering?  What shape is it?

Originally, I thought I'd do a riff on the crescent shaped shawls I'd designed this year. And I am, but not in the way that you'd think.  I'll write more about that as the design progresses.

For now?  I've cast on almost 500 stitches, and have been slowly chugging along the bottom border:

 
 

Happily, the Tech Guy and I have been working up all the charts, and I've actually pretty much got the pattern written at this point.  Once my sample is done, I'll hand it off to a test-knitter to make sure everything is clear and concise.  I'm so happy about this, we've worked hard to make the charts lovely and despite my not being a cotton/linen knitter, or a pink person, this is working out to be really lovely, and I'm *itching* to get it done!